Amd64 vs i686 Pentium D

[mamamia88]

I ordered a cheap computer on ebay and it comes with 3.0 ghz dual core 3.0ghz pentium d and 2gb ram. I plan on hooking it up to tv for basic stuff and will probably go with debian 7 or arch on it. Probably debian since I don't need. latest and greatest and I'm lazy. Should I go with a 64 bit image just in case?

[mips]

I don't see why not.

[mamamia88]

Care ti clarify? I could probably upgrade to 4gb ram pretty cheap on this machine then again I'm gonna use xfce version of debian so probably wont need it. Will performance be same either way? Will I break compatability with simple stuff like vlc or anything? Basically all I really want to run is vlc and chrome. maybe a light bt client.

[sanderj]

Should I go with a 64 bit image just in case?

in case of what?

[mamamia88]

in case of what?

I up the ram to 4gb

[oldos2er]

I would go with 64-bit. If you run CPU-intensive tasks you will notice a speed difference; for daily tasks not so much.

[MadmanRB]

I dunno, because its an older processor you may want to go 32bit.
It wont be beneficial to go 64bit if the max ram is 4GB

[sanderj]

I up the ram to 4gb

32-bit Ubuntu can handle RAM well above 4GB, thanks to PAE.

Anyway:
1) you can choose both 32-bit and 64-bit
2) it doesn't matter much for the (practical) amount of RAM you can address
3) I would choose 64-bit ... because you can

[lykwydchykyn]

As long as you run the PAE kernel on any distro (and assuming the CPU supports PAE, which this should), you can handle up to 64GB on 32bit linux. I don't think debian defaults to a pae kernel, but there's one in the repos.

The only time I've had trouble running 64bit is when I tried to install some off-the-wall proprietary stuff that was 32bit only. Probably nothing that's going to be an issue on a TV system.

[uRock]

I dunno, because its an older processor you may want to go 32bit.
It wont be beneficial to go 64bit if the max ram is 4GB

+1 I installed lubuntu 32bit on my old Lenovo and it runs better that the 64 bit install did. That system only has 2 gigabytes of RAM.