32 bit os on 64 bit cpu

[darkmage1991]

hi all1 ,
my grandparents went and paid a friend of my sis's to build them a computer he seemed to do pretty good. its got a asus M3A-H/Hdmi motherboard, ati radeon x1650 video card, 2gigs of ram, windows 7 32 bit, and a amd phenom 9600 quad core cpu.

when i seen the cpu i thought wow shouldn't he have installed 64bit windows 7 on this rig instead of 32 bit?

is having 32bit windows 7 holding this computer back? its not slow at all, but i am curious, if 64bit would of been a better choice.

if 64bit could run faster i will probably put 64bit on this rig and upgrade to 4 gigs of ram

 

[fastdude]

Upgrading to 4GB of RAM would make that rig faster, as would a new video card. But as your system is ATM, 32-bit is not holding anything back at all. If you stuck another 2GB of RAM in there you might want 64-bit, because 32-bit only "recognises" up to 3.5GB of RAM, so your investment in RAM wouldn't be fully utilised. What would really speed up things is a new GPU, even a cheap one, that X series is ancient

 

[Aastii]

Upgrading to 4GB of RAM would make that rig faster, as would a new video card. But as your system is ATM, 32-bit is not holding anything back at all. If you stuck another 2GB of RAM in there you might want 64-bit, because 32-bit only "recognises" up to 3.5GB of RAM, so your investment in RAM wouldn't be fully utilised. What would really speed up things is a new GPU, even a cheap one, that X series is ancient

If they don't game, fold or render at all, then upgrading to a new GPU wouldn't do a single thing at all, and as they got an x1650 and said it is very fast, I doubt that they game

@OP you won't see a performance difference between 32 and 64 bit operating systems. Like fastdude said, the only realy major difference is the ammount of memory that is supported. 32 bit can officially support up to 4GiB, however, in reality, due to certain amounts being used by other things and certain limitations, only ~3.25GiB, give or take, is ever recognised, so if using any more than 3GiB, you should really be on a 64 bit OS, just so the memory is fully utilised.

When a processor says it is 64 bit, it means it has 64 bit architecture and can support a 64 bit OS. It doesn't mean that it necessarily NEEDS a 64 bit OS to work or perform as well as it can

 

[ZER0X]

the only realy major difference is the ammount of memory that is supported

That and some applications and games won't be supported by a 64-bit operating system.

 

[tremmor]

grandma and grandpa will do just fine with XP and 32 bit.
cheers to grand parents!