Only 64-bit systems can address more than 4GB of RAM, so this one reason alone is why most people choose one over the other.Īs my esteemed predecessor Lincoln Spector discussed previously, there is a workaround called Physical Address Extension (PAE) that allows 32-bit systems to address up to 64GB of RAM, but only server editions of Windows offer it. For example, if you have a system with 4GB of RAM but your video card has 1GB of memory in it, that leaves just 2.5GB of memory for the OS to use, which isn’t much at all for Windows.Įven worse, you could theoretically have an 8GB system running 32-bit Windows, which means there’s 4GB of memory in your system that might as well be used as a drink coaster. For Windows it’s usually about 3.5GB total.

The biggest difference between 32-bit and 64-bit OSes is that the 32-bit version can only address a bit less than 4GB of memory, in total, for the entire system, and this includes the memory in your video card.

Now that you know what you have, does it matter? It could matter a lot, depending on how you use your PC.

Windows 7 gaming pc