Well, it's been about a week since I installed the 64 bit edition of Windows XP, and yesterday I decided to give up and go back to the good old 32 bit edition. As I mentioned in my previous post, there was just too much weirdness. What I've done is repartition my drive a little, changing one big boot partition into one 35GB for XP 32bit, and reserving a small 15GB partition which I plan to install the 64 bit edition of Vista beta2 on when it's released. Hopefully that's not too far off. I have to say, for now Windows XP 32 bit feels much more comfortable, and I can't really point to any performance difference at all. That said, I didn't really find any 64 bit edition of an app I rely on regularly.

Since my cool new workstation now runs a 64-bit CPU, I figure the natural thing to do is to install Windows XP x64. I'm a little apprehensive about the whole thing, thanks to mixed feedback from Baldido and other friends, reporting that this feels like "old" 32-bit Windows XP retrofitted with 64 bit support as an afterthought. Which I guess is actually what it is. Already, just a few hours after installation, I'm seeing some of these quirks surface. Also, I can't for the life of me understand the point of having separate \Program Files directories for native 64 bit apps and 32 bit apps. One of the first quirks I came across was during the installation of Adobe Creative Suite 2; XP x64 instructs it to default to \Program Files (WOW64), but according to the Adobe installer, ( is not a valid character in the installation path :) Furthermore neither PDF Printer driver in Acrobat 7 Pro nor the Flashpaper printer driver that comes with Studio 8 work under XP x64. Other quirks include some poorly coded apps that check the OS version before installing, and come up with Windows 2003 SP1 instead of XP, and thus refuse to install. Some also demand that you have SP2, which is a bit hard with XP x64. I got to say, I'm not impressed. I'll give it a chance tho...

So I finally finished the workstation rebuild, and it's looking good! I ordered 3 new main parts for this.

1. The excellent dual core, 64 bit AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual-Core 4800+ CPU
2. The ultra cool Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard with passive chipset cooling
3. Graphics powered by the very powerful ATI based Club 3D X1900XT 512MB PCI-E card

Oh, and 2GB of DDR400 RAM :) As I mentioned in yesterdays post, the reason I consider these rebuilds so important is that they force me to familiarize myself with new stuff on the market. The big challenge/surprise for me this time was the whole Nvidia SLI vs. ATI Crossfire thing. The way I normally choose my components is by starting with the CPU, then let that dictate which mobos I choose between, which in turn decides the memory, etc. This time however, I discovered that the graphics card decision also affects the chipset/mobo decision. Well, it does if you ever plan to add another card, at least. For me that wasn't a big deal, as I can't afford to add another card anytime soon anyway. But I was thinking that sometime down the line adding a similar second hand card could be a cheap way to extend the life of the setup. But dual card setups these days are dependant on chipset support - if you want SLI with two Geforce cards you need a chipset with SLI support (in practice a NForce4), and if you want Crossfire with two Radeon cards you need a chipset with Crossfire support (which means an ATI chipset). To complicate matters (for themselves, mostly), to set up a dual ATI system, one of the boards must be a Crossfire edition master card. That instantly lowers the appeal of the system as there's bound to be a lot fewer of those second hand around than 'just' another Geforce 7800GTX in a few years. So despite the ATI x1900xt comes out on top in reviews both in single and dual setups at the time I make the order, I'm aiming for the Geforce 7800GTX. That is, until I find out Nvidia expects me to pay €250 MORE for a inferior performing card! No way, I refuse to get conned. However, despite logic telling me I should now get a ATI based motherboard, I just couldn't find a motherboard with the featureset of some of the nForce4 based mobos out there. I briefly considered the MSI A8N Diamond Plus, mainly because of the onboard Creative soundcard, but I chickend out and went for my alltime favourite mobo maker Asus instead. That's how I ended up with the rather eccentric solution of a nForce4 SLI16 based mobo and a x1900xt graphics card. Phew, I'm tired... guess I'll do the OS install and post some pics tomorrow.

Tomorrow I will finally start the first major PC upgrade in 3 years. I figured I should write down some thoughts around this, if for nothing else then at least to keep them for my own reference. 3 years ago I spent a lot of money on building a very powerful system, going with components with a relative specification much higher than I ever had before. To my delight, it has held up surprisingly well, and I've had no reason to upgrade before. In fact, the main reason I'm upgrading today is because my server is starting to struggle, and I want to use the motherboard, cpu and ram from my old workstation in the server. Of the components, only the ATI 9700 Pro graphics card is starting to show it's age.

Read more...