Microsoft’s Windows Xp Professional X64 (bit) Edition.
While Microsoft irons out Vista’s problems and bugs, we can at least use their last big OS upgrade Xp 64.
Now let me start off by saying if you don’t do video, audio or even large graphics file manipulation, than there is no reason to switch to Xp 64.
In fact it may be more trouble than it’s worth.
But if you need a high-powered workstation that can use the extra bandwidth 64 bit computing can offer, than Xp 64 is a winner.
First you need hardware that is 64 bit capable, in the Cpu department both Amd and Intel have 64 bit offerings.
This OS was long overdue when it came out and is the basically the test version of Vista ultimate 64 yet to be released.
It does not have the power hungry graphics environment that Vista sports so it’s leaner and meaner.
That said, I was able to load it on a very fast Asus K8NE deluxe nforce 3, AMD Athlon 64 socket 754 motherboard, I chose Nvidia parts (chipset and video card) because they had drivers available for the OS.
After loading the OS and putting in all the 64 bit specific drivers for the motherboard and video card, I put in my fancy M-audio delta 10/10 soundcard with an analog break out box (the break out box keeps the audio pretty much noise free as computers are really not made/shielded for audio, lucky for me they had a beta driver on their site that was available for download.I though I would not be able to load all my hardware and I was concerned that it might be to new to work properly, but my fears were unjustified.It was finally time to do some multitracking…. I used Steinberg’s Cubase 3 and Wavelab 5.
Right off the bat I noticed it (the OS and soundcard) sounded really frickin good.
I wondered why that was …I remember reading an article in Recording magazine or Remix (I forget which) that said you would actually gain 6 db of headroom or something to that effect.
I don’t understand how, I guess 64 has double the bandwidth in theory than regular 32,
This in turn provides more headroom. Whatever, it just sounds great!
The writes (recorded tracks) to the drive were incredibly fast.
The Asus motherboard had fussy memory specs; I only had 768 MB of single channel memory available.
Not much for a Audio machine or any machine these days, but the memory was high performance, high quality Crucial Ballistix DDR400 that requires a voltage boost in the bios to run optimally.
Well 768 MB was plenty and the computer never burped once, actually it worked better than any 32 version ever has for me.
Cubase (my multitrack app) is not 64 from the ground up like Cakewalk Sonar 64, but is coded to work in 64 it was quite happy taking advantage of the extra power/bandwidth of X 64’s platform.
The virtual led’s of Cubase that show the individual tracks volume responded much quicker in X64 than the did on a similar Xp 32 machine with much more memory 2 gig to be exact.
I have seen Cubase tax the best machines out there, one time I saw it play a huge file loaded with audio tracks, midi tracks, samplers, and drum machines etc.,
I looked like the host computer was gonna blow any minute, the video appeared to be breathing and dimming in time to the music.
It was like Cubase was sucking all the power away from the graphics.It was something else.
Anyway Xp 64 seems to be more robust and Cubase worked like a champ, even with its crappy dongle/hardware copy protection usb key.
If you do audio on a computer and don’t use a Mac or can’t afford a Mac, Xp 64 is for you.
I have not tried to use X64 for anything else, I am curious to see how it works with printers and spooling.
I will never know because the computer used in this review, will always be a dedicated multitrack recorder.
I had a friend come over and tell me “oh X64 caused big problems at work” I said “yeah no shit don’t load a 64 bit OS for 32 bit office apps”.
To me X64 would be in the art dept, not on everyone’s desk.
Although I talked to a kid who works at Microsoft and he told me he uses Xp 64 for everything games etc. He was running two video cards in Sli as well.
I guess you’ll just have to try it yourself.
Its really cheap right now, an Oem version at Newegg.com is $134.99 plus S&H.
I think I paid $160.00 for my copy when it came out. Ouch!
I have a feeling that Vista Ultimate 64 will not be as fast and lean as this OS- (If you can call Xp lean).
This is a very exciting time for operating systems. Vista might make or break Microsoft.
Maybe Mac OSX Leopard will be released to run on Windows computers, and Linux is on the move going after Apple and Microsoft…It will be a very interesting year or two.
