Just some advice on buying a chip..

Hi
Been a little while (year or so),,since I bought a chip,,
I am looking for one for my brother as I will be putting it together for him (buying MB,,HDD,,RAM ,,CARDS...also).

I have noticed a lot of reasonably priced AMD64 and Celeron 64 bit chips..and was wondering,,(since I have heard there is software compatability problems).

Would it be feasable to set up the system as 64 bit,,my brother would be doing the usual stuff,,web browsing,,office,,media,,and photoshop.

Since these chips are reasonably priced I was considering going that way and was wondering if there would be problems for an every day user.(for example would he have troubles finding software to run on it).

Cheers

PS. Would also be running Linux.

Yes, AMD64 chips are good. All the softwares I know, are available in x64 versions too, say Linux..yes it is.

first it depends on what type of software you use, if you find yourself only using things that are supplied by your distro, then i will say you will have almost no problems as all that stuff will work great on 64-bit

however, if you play some games (such as et) you may find that they need to be run in 32-bit mode, this leads to the need to have a 32-bit library and a 64-bit library of the same thing, and this can get some stuff messed up when your compiling (like install into the wrong folder because you now have a 32 and 64 lib directory), some older software will refuse to compile too

the biggest problem i think you will find is java/Flash/Video, java doesn't have that great support for 64-bit (you can't use Sun's version), Macromedia has yet to release a 64-bit version of the player (or Flash 8 for any Linux), and many video formats are done by using windows dll files, because they are 32 bit you can't use them (this applies for stuff like realplayer/WMP formats), i believe the best way to solve this though is just run firefox and all plugins in a 32-bit jail (at least that's what i heard), this will make most of the standard web stuff work but it means you can't use 64-bit firefox (not that its that big of a difference)

i would get the 64-bit chip, they have 32-bit support, so if you find that 64-bit doesn't cut it for you you can reinstall to get 32-bit and later upgrade back to 64-bit if you want

advice = amd or you fail

I would say it's always down to personal preference so you're hardly likely to fail if you don't use AMD.

I'm running Windows XP x64 on an AMD 3200+, and its fine for home usage, development, and the occasional game. The driver support has matured enough that its not an issue and compatability is flawless with 32-bit applications. A large number of services that are system level and must be ported to 64-bit (such as anti-virus, cd recording, defragmenting and other system tools) have largely been ported over by now.

Most software is still 32-bit since there isn't a significant benefit from moving upwards. A 64-bit system is better for heavy number crunching operations since large data sets can be processed in fewer passes and can address more memory. For Intel/AMD chips, applications can utilize additional registers and will be compiled with the ideal instruction set (rather than possibly using archiac, slow x86 instructions). The big negative is that since everything must be represented as 64-bit values, elements take up more space (using up more RAM/cache).

Its pretty break even performance-wise - it would be slower but Windows x64 is a faster code-base than XP. Most motherboards still limit to 4GB, but x64 probably partitions the memory better so you could utilize more of the RAM (rather than the normal 2-2 or 3-1 split between application/kernal memory).

Summary: Home use, its break-even.

P.S. Intel Core2 (aka Conroe) is due out soon, which is an impressive processor. In anticipation, a price war is currently on. Usually after a next generation processor is launched, prices of current generation chips reduce.