64 bit pfSense on Pentium D with 3GB Ram?

Bai Shen · Feb 2, 2011, 6:25 PM

Looking to try out 2.0 and I'm not sure which version to use. I have a Pentium D with 3GB of Ram. Should I run 32 or 64 bit on it?

I've previously gone by the guideline that you should stick with 32 bit when running with 4GB or less memory. Is that still the case? Will I notice any differences?

I don't plan on upgrading this box, so I won't have to worry about more than 4GB of memory.

jimp · Feb 2, 2011, 7:10 PM

It could go either way on that hardware. Some things will run faster on amd64, others may be slower, it will in general use more RAM, but I don't think anyone has done any benchmarks.

Bai Shen · Feb 2, 2011, 10:21 PM

Okay. Tryin' it with 64 bit first. We'll see if I have any problems.

jasonlitka · Feb 4, 2011, 5:20 PM

Just as an FYI, the netburst P4 CPUs were almost universally slower in 64-bit mode than in 32-bit. I never ran 64-bit installs of Windows or Linux on them unless I had to in order to access all the installed RAM.

Bai Shen · Feb 4, 2011, 5:40 PM

@jasonlitka:

Just as an FYI, the netburst P4 CPUs were almost universally slower in 64-bit mode than in 32-bit. I never ran 64-bit installs of Windows or Linux on them unless I had to in order to access all the installed RAM.

How's that?

jasonlitka · Feb 4, 2011, 10:28 PM

Because Intel's implementation of tacking on 64-bit extensions to a 32-bit design stunk. Here's an old page on X-bit Labs with some nice benchmarks showing the A64 being faster in 64-bit than 32-bit and the P4 being slower.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/x86-64-rc1_11.html

Bai Shen · Feb 5, 2011, 3:38 PM

I'll check it out. Thanks.