64 Bits: Windows XP X64 Edition
Microsoft recently released RC2 of Windows XP x64 Edition. Installing it to our test system was a piece of cake, as there are no fundamental differences between it and Windows XP SP2. However, when we searched for the drivers that we wanted to install, we had to accept that it's still a bit too early: Intel does not yet offer 64 bit chipset drivers. Usually, the standard Windows drivers are fast enough, but one won't be able to achieve maximum performance without optimized versions.
Also, you should not expect every 32 bit Windows program to run properly on x64 Edition. Naturally, we tried most of the programs in our benchmarking suite with the x64 Edition of Windows XP, but we stopped benchmarking pretty quickly. Conclusion: most 32 bit applications run slightly slower on the 64 bit edition of Windows.
