9600gt/64bit question

[Mattd4AX3]

I'm going to be building myself a new machine because my brother needs one and for me to upgrade my AMD it would cost more than just getting a better machine with a Intel upgrade path.
I'm not going to be buying it for about a month or two, but since I'm not new to linux but this is the first time I've used it steady so I don't know how support for newer products goes.

So my question is, how long does it usually take nvidia to make drivers, I'm certain I'm getting a 9600gt.

My other question is what are the benefits of 64-bit? I'm going to be getting 4gbs of ram and running 64-bit Vista.

[Slocker]

If you are a Desktop user, you read emails, browse the web, and so on, 64bits won't benefit much for you. As you said, the machine can handle large amount of RAM, so that is true. The only benefit is if you work with heavy images or videos. If you are a postproducer, editor, and so on. With the video card, I imagine you won't have problems since it is Nvidia itself who's delivering drivers for its new cards.

[freshandminty]

Mattd4AX3,

I'm building a new box as well, going Intel for the first time and I'm getting at least 1 9600gt to start. Some of my parts are already in transit. I still need to order a couple, I've been watching for some decent deals waiting to the proc prices to start dropping on those that have been out since new chips just got released or will be soon. Anyways, I'll keep you posted if I run into any problems concerning the 9600gt if any arise. I'm hoping things will go smoothly so I can experience some Compiz goodness finally

Also, Slocker is correct, for things like video encoding and such, x64(64bit) is prob the better way to go. For general use, x86(32bit) should work fine. If you are a heavy gamer, eh....you could probably go either way. 32bit will not recognize more than about 3.5GB of ram and as far as I know, this applys to Linux as well as Windows. 64bit gets past that limitation but I can't remember what the upper end ram cap is.

[Slocker]

I thought the limit in the kernel is 64GB, but it's an artificial limit for theorically the limit is far beyond.

By the way yesterday I found this article comparing Ubuntu running on a x86 and on a x86-64 machine. It's in Spanish, but you may go through Gooogle Translate in order to read it en English. As you can see the tests were basically compilling, encoding and rendering images, this is, heavy CPU work. The conclussion of the article is that, for those tasks, 64bits represents a boost of 20% in performance.

You should have in mind, as well, that if you finally install a 64bit version, you will have to do wether install the 32bits version, or do some hacks, in orther to get Flash and Java running.

[Mattd4AX3]

Well, the machines going to be a 64-bit gaming monster. And all the hardware I'm going to be using is brand new with 64-bit drivers available as far as Vista goes.
The machine itself might be used as a lan-party host machine, most of the machines power is going to be used in windows sadly, but I'm considering doing some folding aswell.

Minty please pm me as far as your luck getting compiz to work ! Thanks for the help slocker/minty .