Windows 7 64-bit slower than 32-bit?

[Kev1n]

Take those WEI numbers (especially those for RAM) with a large saltmine.

x64 gets my vote over x32 for safety and security reasons, not *just* performance. Because of Windows on Windows (standard fare for 32-bit apps running on x64 Windows), a misbehaving 32-bit application doesn't bring the whole OS to a halt. (Browser plugins, especially Flash as of late, are the biggest cause of browser-tab misbehavior.)

I have moved friends and relatives to x64 with as little as 512 MB of RAM, and so far, none of them have asked to go back. (Two have, in fact, bought x64 prtables to go along with their x64 desktops.)

But a drop from 7.3 to 5.9 is pretty disconcerting.

Actually, now that I think of it, there may be a reason. This is just guesswork. A few days ago, when I restarted my computer, the BIOS screen came with a message that there was a power surge on the previous run, and that my motherboard (which has in-built anti-surge) prevented any harm. It happened a few times that day, but since then it didn't happen again. Last night, I reran the WEI test and my graphics tests dropped to 6.9, I tried playing Crysis and there was indeed a performance hit- the framerate was bad. I restarted and the same power surge message appeared at the BIOS bootup screen. I reran the test once again and the graphics tests were back to 7.4, and Crysis ran as normal. My dad says this sometimes happens when a high-powered device is turned on, such as a water heater and air-conditioner. I'll get a voltage regulator soon.

So what I'm guessing is, MAYBE the power surges the other day did some damage to my physical RAM sticks? Is there any way to determine if they have been damaged? Any software (apart from WEI) that can assess the RAM performance?

P/S: A reply soon would be appreciated, because the store I bought the computer from has a 7-day 1-for-1 exchange guarantee if any components malfunction, and today is the 7th day.

[Kev1n]

I formtted my primary partition and reinstalled windows 7 32-bit. The RAM score is now 7.3, so I think it's safe to conclude it's got nothing to do with hardware.

[Hani]

I really think you should go back to 64-bit. There is no noticeable performance difference at all. You'll just end up losing 1GB of RAM, for a mere increase in WEI score.

[Kev1n]

I've already gone back to x64. I just wanted to make sure the problem wasn't hardware related.

[Hani]

I've run WEI on the 32-bit installation and the WEI score is 5.1 (same as in x64). Not sure why yours have changed.

[Kev1n]

Will this be one of those things that remain a mystery forever?

[boogerjones]

Will this be one of those things that remain a mystery forever?

Yes, but the answer is probably irrelevant.

As for 32-bit versus 64-bit: you'll find case-scenarios where one is faster than the other. OpenSSL compiled to 32-bits is faster than compiled to 64-bits, except for AES. Various other cryptographics libraries are faster on 64-bit machines. GMP is definitely faster when run in 64-bit code, but this is because it's been optimized for 64-bit processor instructions. Certain Photoshop operations are faster on 64-bit machines; others faster on 32-bit machines. Code that allocates large huge numbers of memory pointers tends to be faster on 32-bit machines since memory allocation is a relatively slow operation. The list goes on...

In the end, the difference will be negligible for 99.99% of your usage, unless you happen to have a very specific implementation that is performance critical. I suspect you do not.

[carmatic]

why dont you use a real benchmark, like the 30 day demo of Passmark... it has a memory-specific benchmark which looks alot more useful than the WEI http://www.passmark.com/products/pt_advmem.htm??

[Hani]

Will this be one of those things that remain a mystery forever?

I guess so :p WEI is extremely flawed, I think they should remove it in the next version of Windows.

[daangelo29]

Or improve it.

In my case, 64 bit is WAY faster and better than 32 bit. It could likely be the 3 to 4 GB RAM upgrade I did. It's just a .1 increment to the base score, but the performance has noticeably been improved. All of my 32 bit games or important software so far run properly in my Windows 7 64 bit.

[Kev1n]

why dont you use a real benchmark, like the 30 day demo of Passmark... it has a memory-specific benchmark which looks alot more useful than the WEI http://www.passmark.com/products/pt_advmem.htm

OK I tried that, compared with 3 other computers with similar specs (Intel i3 530, 4GB RAM, Radeon HD5770), and my overall score is actually the highest, but not by a lot. However, my RAM mark is the lowest of the lot, although again the difference is very small. I'll do a more thorough performance test next time and take a screenshot. I dont know how to interpret the results anyway. :blush:

Or improve it.

In my case, 64 bit is WAY faster and better than 32 bit. It could likely be the 3 to 4 GB RAM upgrade I did. It's just a .1 increment to the base score, but the performance has noticeably been improved. All of my 32 bit games or important software so far run properly in my Windows 7 64 bit.

Hmm, I dont see any noticeable performance boost in Windows 7 64-bit, and judging by the replies in this thead, nor do most others. I wonder why some people are able to see a marked improvement while for others it remains the same.

I have very few x64 software. The few I have are mostly small apps, like WinRAR and iTunes.

P/S: Slightly OT. The game is almost 3 years old, and I still can't play Crysis with max settings. Insane. It looks good, but nowhere near as good as the screenshots here:

[carmatic]

OK I tried that, compared with 3 other computers with similar specs (Intel i3 530, 4GB RAM, Radeon HD5770), and my overall score is actually the highest, but not by a lot. However, my RAM mark is the lowest of the lot, although again the difference is very small. I'll do a more thorough performance test next time and take a screenshot. I dont know how to interpret the results anyway.??:blush:

what i was thinking is that you run the benchmark in x32 windows, then run it again in x64 windows... it should be alot better than looking at WEI scores...

also, why are you posting crysis screenshots in a thread you started about x64 windows? one of the screens is a duplicate...

[Kev1n]

Ah sorry about those screenshots, seems Neowin won't let me edit day-old posts.

I''m done reinstalling Windows, so I'm not going to install x86 and use passmark on it. I guess I'll just let it be for the moment.

[rzz]

Ah sorry about those screenshots, seems Neowin won't let me edit day-old posts.

I''m done reinstalling Windows, so I'm not going to install x86 and use passmark on it. I guess I'll just let it be for the moment.

Noticed the same thing on my new i5 M430 laptop, which for some strange reason shipped with only the 32 bit version of 7 despite coming with 4gb ram stock. In 32-bit memory score is 7.2, x64 it's 5.9. I haven't done extensive benchmarking yet to see if x64 is actually slower than x86 or if it's just a WEI snafu. I'm swapping a larger hd into it today and I think I'll run some benchmarks on clean installs of both versions with just the latest chipset drivers and turbo boost driver installed.

[rzz]

Alright, so just did fresh installs of x86 and x64, no windows updates applied, only installed the latest intel chipset drivers, turbo boost driver and latest manufacturer's nvidia driver (not the most recent laptopvideo2go version), and passmark performance test.

Here's what WEI said in each OS:

x86

cpu   6.4
ram   7.2
2d    6.5
3d    6.5
hd    5.9

x64

cpu   6.6
ram   5.9
2d    6.4
3d    6.4
hd    5.9

But, it turns out it is just the WEI measurement being "different" in x64, at least according to PassMark, x64 definitely performs quite a bit better at almost everything, especially memory and CPU related tasks, not surprisingly, so that's what I'm planning to stick with for now. x64 did perform slightly worse in the 3D graphics tests, though not enough of a difference for me to worry about it personally.

Here's the passmark results for each:

x86

PassMark Rating: 766.6

PassMark(TM) PerformanceTest 7.0 Evaluation Version (http://www.passmark.com)
Results generated on:  April-14-10


Benchmark Results

Test Name: This Computer
CPU - Integer Math: 222.1
CPU - Floating Point Math: 911.4
CPU - Find Prime Numbers: 569.3
CPU - Multimedia Instructions: 6.9
CPU - Compression: 2816.1
CPU - Encryption: 9.0
CPU - Physics: 146.2
CPU - String Sorting: 1981.7
Graphics 2D - Solid Vectors: 0.4
Graphics 2D - Transparent Vectors: 0.4
Graphics 2D - Complex Vectors: 94.1
Graphics 2D - Fonts and Text: 123.8
Graphics 2D - Windows Interface: 69.8
Graphics 2D - Image Filters: 321.1
2D Graphics - Image Rendering: 296.5
Graphics 3D - Simple: 646.1
Graphics 3D - Medium: 214.7
Graphics 3D - Complex: 51.7
Graphics 3D - DirectX 10: 4.2
Memory - Allocate Small Block: 2907.0
Memory - Read Cached: 1804.4
Memory - Read Uncached: 1649.1
Memory - Write: 1120.2
Memory - Large RAM: 959.5
Disk - Sequential Read: 19.5
Disk - Sequential Write: 66.0
Disk - Random Seek + RW: 3.4
CPU Mark: 1918.8
2D Graphics Mark: 201.2
Memory Mark: 694.4
Disk Mark: 321.3
3D Graphics Mark: 503.1
PassMark Rating: 766.6

System information: This Computer
CPU Manufacturer: GenuineIntel
Number of CPU: 1
Cores per CPU: 2
CPU Type: Intel Core i5 M 430 @ 2.27GHz
CPU Speed: 2528.7 MHz
Cache size: 256KB
O/S: Windows 7 (32-bit)
Total RAM: 3060.6 MB.
Available RAM: 2343.3 MB.
Video settings: 1366x768x32
Video driver:
 DESCRIPTION: NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M
 MANUFACTURER: NVIDIA
 BIOS: Version 70.16.3f.0.fb
 DATE: 2-10-2010
Drive Letter: C
Total Disk Space: 29.2 GBytes
Cluster Size: 4.0 KBytes
File system: NTFS

x64

PassMark Rating: 1019.4

PassMark(TM) PerformanceTest 7.0 Evaluation Version (http://www.passmark.com)
Results generated on:  April-14-10


Benchmark Results

Test Name: This Computer
CPU - Integer Math: 957.8
CPU - Floating Point Math: 1113.7
CPU - Find Prime Numbers: 615.8
CPU - SSE: 8.0
CPU - Compression: 2822.7
CPU - Encryption: 10.5
CPU - Physics: 152.3
CPU - String Sorting: 1871.9
Graphics 2D - Solid Vectors: 0.4
Graphics 2D - Transparent Vectors: 0.4
Graphics 2D - Complex Vectors: 104.7
Graphics 2D - Fonts and Text: 161.0
Graphics 2D - Windows Interface: 83.2
Graphics 2D - Image Filters: 241.2
2D Graphics - Image Rendering: 452.8
Graphics 3D - Simple: 645.5
Graphics 3D - Medium: 213.3
Graphics 3D - Complex: 47.3
Graphics 3D - DirectX 10: 4.2
Memory - Allocate Small Block: 4672.1
Memory - Read Cached: 2048.0
Memory - Read Uncached: 1872.7
Memory - Write: 1189.1
Memory - Large RAM: 1675.8
Disk - Sequential Read: 75.9
Disk - Sequential Write: 63.0
Disk - Random Seek + RW: 3.5
CPU Mark: 2695.3
2D Graphics Mark: 235.7
Memory Mark: 993.8
Disk Mark: 514.6
3D Graphics Mark: 491.6
PassMark Rating: 1019.4

System information: This Computer
CPU Manufacturer: GenuineIntel
Number of CPU: 1
Cores per CPU: 2
CPU Type: Intel Core i5 M 430 @ 2.27GHz
CPU Speed: 2528.6 MHz
Cache size: 256KB
O/S: Windows 7 (64-bit)
Total RAM: 3956.6 MB.
Available RAM: 3182.2 MB.
Video settings: 1366x768x32
Video driver:
 DESCRIPTION: NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M
 MANUFACTURER: NVIDIA
 BIOS: Version 70.16.3f.0.fb
 DATE: 2-10-2010
Drive Letter: C
Total Disk Space: 29.3 GBytes
Cluster Size: 4.0 KBytes
File system: NTFS

[Kev1n]

Hah, you've allayed my fears! Thanks a lot!