Is it worth the upgrade?

Is the performance increase (on top of Vista) worth the money?

What do you think?

Have you tried it yet?

Lot's of questions!

There is no performance increase over Vista. IMO no it's not worth the money, unless you were lucky enough to get an "E" edition.

No performance increase with the CPC benchmarks, no increase in 3dmark 06 or Vantage, no performance increase in PCMark Vantage either. Keep the money, spend it on a new GPU or RAM.

If your going from XP yes If your going from Vista its your call.

probably not but as my gaming rig is getting a bit long in the tooth, I will be looking to upgrade it after win7 comes out

I quite like it,

Yes. My main rig has XP, Win7(RC) and ubuntu on it .. just because I like messing around I have found I am mainly on the Win7 nowdays, if not im playing around on ubuntu so the XP partition will probably only kept for anything that steadfastly refuses to run on Win7.

lead on Mcduff!

I thought the only difference with the "E" version was that it wasn't bundled with IE8. Are there other benefits?

As for performance, well, I'd imagine it would be very hard to make a decision on that as it's not even been fully released yet, had any update tweaks, or given ATi or nVidia much time to optimise their drivers.

I know the RC can give a general idea but that's about it at the moment I imagine.

I think the main benefits will come through when DX11 cards start appearing, but as DX11 is a Vista AND Windows 7 thing, I would just wait for the update to Vista - install the 64bit version if you haven't already and spend £50-£80 on more RAM - it flies with 8gb!

Does 8Gb really make that much difference? I'd always assumed, no doubt incorrectly, that 4gb was plenty. I may have to hunt around to see if I can find any stats.

I ordered the W7E when it was £45, too good a price to resist and I've just built a rig for the GF downstairs. I'm just in 2 minds as to whether carry on with V64 on my rig or use W7 and move V64 to the GF's. I have a download of the RC so maybe I'll give it a trial run before I get it.

You can quite happily run without a swap file with 8gb, although it isn't recommended. Needless to say, there is more room for prefetching and storing stuff in RAM, so fewer pauses while files are written to or read from the hard disk. There is a noticeable difference to the responsiveness.

This is worth a read...Clicky

What about 6gig vs 3gig for the i7 peeps. Any thoughts/numbers on that?

12GB is the way forward.

As much as will fit - you can never have too much, unless you are on a 32bit OS!

I can see a benefit of 8gb for general doings on a PC but from what I could find there seems to be absolutely no performance difference between 4gb and 8gb for gaming.

In fact, although almost negligible, on occasion 8gb performed a tad worse than 4gb. Nothing significant either way though.

Its the general stuff that you probably spend the most time doing - RAM isn't going to help running benchmarks that don't make use of them, but with Windowsy stuff it makes the difference.

Also, GTA4 on Vista x64 pushes RAM use up to nearly 4gb...it doesn't leave you a lot of breathing room if you only have 4gb! There are a few other games that get close to that too.

Not on my upstairs PC, that's purely for games. My GF isn't allowed on that one.


Aye, forgot about GTA4. TBH I think anything extra would help, it does seem to look at whatever computer it's running on and figure out the best way of making it strain.

Well of course anything extra would help. But if you've got Win7 and i7, you've probably spent a reasonable amount of money already. So my question was, is 3gig enough at DDR3 prices? Or would you notice the difference with 6gig?