One of the biggest advantages of the Athlon64 is, well, 64-bit computing. It will be quite a while until we see a complete shift to a 64-bit Operating System/Applications environment, however the process has started. Microsoft has already made a freely downloadable beta version of Windows XP-64 Bit Edition while drivers have also started appearing from the likes of nVidia, Creative, VIA and Silicon Image.

On the applications side, since the Athlon64 is completely backward compatible, you should have no problems running any 32-bit applications on a 32-bit Operating System. The problem comes when you try to run 32-bit applications on a 64-bit O/S and although Microsoft supports a “32-bit” compatibility mode in its Windows XP 64-bit Edition, you will run into problems with certain applications like the Adobe Acrobat 5.0 which is a part of the Sysmark 2004 benchmarking suite. Similarly, Windows Media Encoder 9 also refused to install while Aquamark 3 installed but refused to run.

However, compatibility isn’t the focus of this article- benchmarking is. Sometime back, we internally benchmarked Windows XP-64 bit Edition with 32-bit apps and found that a lot of work needed to be done to bring the performance level at least on par with running the same applications on a 32-bit O/S. With the release of 64-bit drivers for the nForce3 platform from nVidia, we decided to re-benchmark these applications in both 32-bit and 64-bit version of Windows XP and see if the performance gap has closed in or not. That is precisely what this article is about and without further wait, lets take a look at the testbed.

One thing we would like to point out is that installing the IDE driver on Windows XP-64 bit Edition Beta always caused the system to crash and damage Windows to a state where you would have to re-intsall it. However, since the driver as well as the O/S is in a beta state, such things are not surprsing. For all tests, uur Corsair memory module was set at DDR400 speeds and 2.0-5-2-2 timings . For benchmarking we've selected the following applications:

SiSoft Sandra 2004:	Both 64-bit and 32-bit version of this application were used for CPU, FPU and Memory Bandwidth Benchmarks
PC Mark 04:	CPU, Memory, Graphics and Hard Drive Benchmarks
Quake3 Arena:	Fastest Setting at 640x480 resolution as well as High Quality Settings at 800x600 Resolution
3D Mark 2001SE:	Default settings using the latest build.
Unreal Tournament 2003:	Using the built-in benchmarking app in the downloaded demo, we ran the Flyby & BotMatch at 1024x768
Commanche 4:	Default Settings used at 800x600 resolution
3D Workstation:	SpecView Perf 7.11 at default settings.

If you would like for us to add any additional benchmarking software, please email us at suggestions@tbreak.com