Windows 7 System Requirements Finalized

[Harby]

[citation][nom]IzzyCraft[/nom]It's more of xp emulation so it's more of a ram thing to make another desktop etc.[/citation]

All Athlons X2 (families F and G, check with cpu-z) support hardware virtualization.

Also this little tool can instantly tell you if your CPU supports hardware virtualization:

http://www.grc.com/securable.htm

 

[Guest]

My Windows beta installed just fine on a 6GB disk!
Part of the whole is the pagefile (with 1-2GB of RAM, you can set it between 500 and 1024MB), and the Hybernation file.
The hybernation file takes up as much space as your ram (at least on XP), so I think it's a bit unfair to complain why 7 takes up 20GB with 12GB of RAM installed.
The sweetspot of a new installed Win 7 is 1GB of RAM (with 32-64MB shared video) ram. Disable hybernation and (which might not be available anymore on all Win 7 versions), and set swap to 512MB. Disable rollback service (windows recovery) and disable aero too.
Your system will fit on a 6Gb disk.
Install some office and other small applications and it all fits nice on a 12GB SSD; or cramped on a 8GB SSD.Perhaps we'll see flash memory going down in price soon, if win 7 equipped mininotebooks are being sold with 16GB SSD's; but that'll take MS to work on their defrag program quite a lot.
Also the Win7 starter edition will have a smaller footprint I hope.

 

[tipoo]

*Glances at Via C3 in the corner*

 

[ta152h]

Going back to the Pentium III situation, realistically speaking, anyone wishing to use it, will not be using PC133 SDRAM. You can with a Coppermine, but Coppermine's are pretty slow. Tualatins will require in most cases DDR 266 MHz memory, for the simple reason the i815 doesn't support more than 512 MB, and you'll need the Apollo Pro 266T for the chipset (unless you get one of the ServerWorks chipsets, which is a mistake for desktop). You can use SDRAM with some motherboards of the Apollo Pro 266T, but most support only DDR.

Most of the time, even to this day, I use Tualatin. It's a Celeron 1.4 GHz, and if I need to, I can overclock it easily to 1.6 GHz, which has the additional benefit of increasing the memory bus speed (which is a huge bottleneck on this processors).

The Pentium III-S is the 512K version, server version. It's much faster because of the bus speed, faster L2 cache, and larger cache memory. But, it's really not supposed to be used in a desktop motherboard, and will degrade because of the different load line characteristics.

The desktop Pentium III is a strange bird, having 256K cache, and the 1333 MHz bus, but only running at 1.2 GHz. Whether it's better than the Celeron is debatable, and it's harder to find for sure. At stock speeds it is, but the Celeron is really easy to overclock because only the processor is being overclocked, the memory is still under the 133 MHz value.

It's surely faster than the Atom, which is a very primitive processor. Memory performance is better, but everything else is much worse. The Pentium III is much more advanced.

By the way, the reason boards couldn't initialize more than 512MB was the 815 chipset. Intel deliberated weakened this chipset with mediocre performance and limited memory support so as not to compete too strongly with the RDRAM based i820, which sucked bad, or the higher end i840, which was actually quite excellent. In fact, the 440BX supported 2 GB, and performed better than the i815, but was not made for 133 MHz, and when overclocked to 133 MHz, would also overclock your AGP bus to 89 MHz.

The i840 was excellent, but expensive, and used VERY expensive RDRAM. The i820 sucked, and used VERY expensive RDRAM. i815 was mediocre, and didn't support much memory, and the 440BX had to run AGP overclocked if you wanted to run it 133 MHz. So, none were perfect solutions, which gave VIA an opening.

For the Tualatin, only the 815 came over, while VIA moved their 133T and Apollo Pro 266T to support it. The Apollo Pro was the clearly the best, having much better memory performance than the 133t (even when using SDRAM), and support dual processors and a lot of memory. There were some weird 815 boards with dual processors, but they were hard to find, and DDR showed greater advantages in dual processor roles (since the requesting processor didn't hog the memory bus for as long, since the burst completed faster with DDR).

 

[Pei-chen]

[citation][nom]soldier37[/nom]My system that i will have at time of release of Win 7henom 2 955 at 4ghzMSI 790FX Quad Crossfire Mb8 Gb DDR3 1333 ramATI 1GB 4890/4870 in Crossfire2 x 150GB Raptors in Raid 0Windows Vista 64Bit SP1Thermaltake Toughpower 750W PSGateway 1920 x 1200 panel DVI3 20 xDVD RW burners/1 6 xBlu Ray readerI should be good for a while even after 7 releases,lol[/citation]
But can it run Crysis?

 

[WheelsOfConfusion]

[citation][nom]apache_lives[/nom]What happened to motherboard makers making a desktop motherboard for laptop chips - they were the true power savers.[/citation]
Those still exist, but the proliferation of mini-ITX and the advent of the Atom have pushed them into an even smaller niche than they used have. Laptop components are guaranteed to be expensive for their performance level.

 

[fwupow]

They're gonna sucker people in with glitzy demos of half-baked features like Vista's voice recognition that doesn't work with MS-Excel. I'm still waiting for them to fix UAC. They've proven with Vista, that they care not one stitch about you and your problems/complaints etc. after they've got your money.

How many of your peripherals will be rendered useless by unavailable Windows 7 drivers this time? The manufacturer will blame MS and MS will blame the manufacturer and you'll be left using your $1500 video camera for a paperweight.

 

[Master Exon]

Or you can blame yourself for being a early adopter when you are clearly not in the position to be an early adopter...

 

[belardo]

Such weak requirements. They should be more realistic. Considering that entry level Vista PCs at $350~400 have 3GB of RAM and 250+GB HD as well as a dual core CPU of 2.0Ghz or better.

When they post info like that, a novice user would actually try to run Win7 or vista on a 1.4Ghz P4 (UGH) with 1GB of RAM... (Aaaaaaaaay!)

 

[Vettedude]

That's it. I'm gonna go buy an extra stick of RAM for my old Dimension 2400 and get Windows 7!!!!!

 

[apache_lives]

[citation][nom]ta152h[/nom]Going back to the Pentium III situation, realistically speaking, anyone wishing to use it, will not be using PC133 SDRAM. You can with a Coppermine, but Coppermine's are pretty slow. Tualatins will require in most cases DDR 266 MHz memory, for the simple reason the i815 doesn't support more than 512 MB, and you'll need the Apollo Pro 266T for the chipset (unless you get one of the ServerWorks chipsets, which is a mistake for desktop). You can use SDRAM with some motherboards of the Apollo Pro 266T, but most support only DDR. Most of the time, even to this day, I use Tualatin. It's a Celeron 1.4 GHz, and if I need to, I can overclock it easily to 1.6 GHz, which has the additional benefit of increasing the memory bus speed (which is a huge bottleneck on this processors).The Pentium III-S is the 512K version, server version. It's much faster because of the bus speed, faster L2 cache, and larger cache memory. But, it's really not supposed to be used in a desktop motherboard, and will degrade because of the different load line characteristics. The desktop Pentium III is a strange bird, having 256K cache, and the 1333 MHz bus, but only running at 1.2 GHz. Whether it's better than the Celeron is debatable, and it's harder to find for sure. At stock speeds it is, but the Celeron is really easy to overclock because only the processor is being overclocked, the memory is still under the 133 MHz value. It's surely faster than the Atom, which is a very primitive processor. Memory performance is better, but everything else is much worse. The Pentium III is much more advanced. By the way, the reason boards couldn't initialize more than 512MB was the 815 chipset. Intel deliberated weakened this chipset with mediocre performance and limited memory support so as not to compete too strongly with the RDRAM based i820, which sucked bad, or the higher end i840, which was actually quite excellent. In fact, the 440BX supported 2 GB, and performed better than the i815, but was not made for 133 MHz, and when overclocked to 133 MHz, would also overclock your AGP bus to 89 MHz. The i840 was excellent, but expensive, and used VERY expensive RDRAM. The i820 sucked, and used VERY expensive RDRAM. i815 was mediocre, and didn't support much memory, and the 440BX had to run AGP overclocked if you wanted to run it 133 MHz. So, none were perfect solutions, which gave VIA an opening.For the Tualatin, only the 815 came over, while VIA moved their 133T and Apollo Pro 266T to support it. The Apollo Pro was the clearly the best, having much better memory performance than the 133t (even when using SDRAM), and support dual processors and a lot of memory. There were some weird 815 boards with dual processors, but they were hard to find, and DDR showed greater advantages in dual processor roles (since the requesting processor didn't hog the memory bus for as long, since the burst completed faster with DDR).[/citation]

Coppermines were not that much slower, even if they were the gen. before tualatin.

Tualatins had no need for DDR ram and 99% of the systems out there didnt use DDR or RD and stuck with good old SDR (and a perfect 1:1 - FSB133 SDR133), and VIA chipsets are a VIA products which follow the general trend of being garbage (even today, and thank VIA for ruining AMD's name for many years too).

Celeron 1.4 chips were also rare, the average ones being the 1.1a or the 1.3

The 440BX chipset was actually originally designed for Pentium 2's and Katmai Pentium 3's (SLOT1, 250nm), and workstations etc - the lack of dividers/ratios is because it started of as a 66mhz FSB part with 100mhz FSB support.

[citation][nom]Master Exon[/nom]*Sigh*, why didn't they make it 64-bit only?[/citation]

Second that

[citation][nom]eddieroolz[/nom]Funny, my Beta doesn't even seem to take up 20GB, and its 64bit too.[/citation]

All these recommendations are because the more unaware home users need space for there music and crap, but for us more educated folk, we know we can pull of stunts like that if we have to.

 

[Vettedude]

[citation][nom]JimmiG[/nom]I use my netbook at least 10 hours a week. Pretty good for something that's "useless". I'll stick with XP on it though - even if you can strip down the installation size of Win7, it will use much more than my nLited version of XP. [/citation]

Plus, do you want to only be able to have 3 apps open?

 

[Guest]

It's a lot of disk space for an operating system that don't include office package, a bunch of SDKs, compiler, IDE, database server, web server, MTA and so on.
How much ram don't you need if you decide to run an application? you need already 1GB to run the OS...
The only good thing is that there are plenty of better options out there.

 

[bboysil]

[citation][nom]1raflo[/nom]pretty much the vista requirements[/citation]
Yup, pretty much the same.

 

[toyeboy]

people complaining about the system requirements need to stop whining and buy a new computer for like $400 and you'll be set to run this. Memory is CHEAP you can get 4 gigs for $60. It's time to throw away that old pentium 3 system...there'd be no purpose in installing windows 7 on old hardware anyway.
I just don't understand why some think they needed to upgrade to Vista and now windows 7 when XP runs just fine on older hardware.

 

[ta152h]

Apache,

You're actually wrong about the 440BX, it was designed for 100 MHz from the start. It replaced the 440LX, which was 66 MHz. It actually used PCI to connect the northbridge and southbridge, which is one improvement the 8xx series chipset had, a dedicated bus (called Hub architecture by Intel). Even the Pentium II supported 100 MHz FSB (Deschutes), and all Katmai's did. All.

Intel didn't originally even want to go to SDRAM at 133 MHz originally, and only did it grudgingly. They preferred RDRAM, and said SDRAM wasn't reliable at that speed, initially.

Tualatins are considerably faster because they have pre-fetch logic, and run at higher clock speeds. You can easily overclock at Tualatin to 1.6 GHz, Coppermines had serious problems getting over 1.1 GHz. Tualatins are at least 50% faster, and if you go with the 512K version, far more. That's significant.

You pulled the 99% out of your backside. You're wrong, but it's irrelevant anyway. You seem to be forgetting that Intel was pushing RDRAM big time, and even though it generally was poorly suited for the platform, it did sell in significant numbers. Certainly more than 1%.

There are examples where the extra throughput of RDRAM and DDR made a difference even for the Pentium III. If you didn't know already, AGP accessed memory, so applications that were using that bus extensively showed very big advantages with the higher throughput memory. In fact, so much so that Pentium IIIs with the i840 beat Athlons in some applications they never should have, except for the memory bandwidth the system provided. Dual processing was another example. Since the burst was done more quickly, the other processor didn't have to wait as long to get the bus if it needed it. For most applications though, the memory throughput wasn't very useful, and memory latency was.

With regards to VIA sucking, as a general rule it's true, but the Apollo Pro 266 was not a bad chipset, but any standard. It performed as well as the i815, and a little better overall, and of course raped it in those applications that could take advantage of the memory bandwidth (which, admittedly, were few). More importantly, it was considerably better in dual processor configurations, and most importantly, could use more than 512MB. The Serverworks chipsets are good in their own way, but have a lot of problems with AGP. The best Pentium III processor is the Tualatin, by at least 50%, and the best chipset for it is the Apollo Pro 266T, despite a general tendency of VIA to suck. Some of that, though, is Intel didn't really make much of an effort for the Tualatin. If they brought over the i840 for it, it would surely have been different, but instead, they just brought the mediocre i815.

 

[apache_lives]

RDRam was big in the early Pentium 4 days when that was just about the only option at the time, not the P3 days.

I still get people bringing in Pentium 3 systems to "fix" (which i decline usually because the repair cost exceed's the system value, too old) - only ever seen 1 DDR based setup and the rest were SDR and that one DDR system - saw that nearly 2 years ago and havnt seen one since, so thats more like 99.99998%

If you check out any older dell/gateway/compaq there all using a BX chipset with a P2 300, rather then a 350 at 100mhz FSB etc

VIA chipsets have always given headaches - bugs from nvidia compatibility issues to not running certain apps (even saw one that refused to run 3DMark99) - not worth it at all.

Im not debaiting that the tualatins were a bad chip - not at all they were great, but they didnt leap masivly or anything - the usual generation to generation jump, and as for coppermines 1.1ghz limit (if that) - 180nm limits and that was perhaps a factor that made Intel design the Pentium 4 to combat that scaling limit.

 

[ta152h]

Tualatins were not a generational shift, they were Pentium IIIs that were shrunk, and with pre-fetch logic added.

Pentium 4s were initially only available with RDRAM, which was very effective with it, since the processor could use the memory. Intel wanted RDRAM production to be ramped up by then, so tried really hard to push Pentium III customers to it.

That you've seen so few hardly reflects the whole market. DDR was not so common, but RDRAM was for a while, despite being grossly overpriced. In fact, Intel even packaged the memory with the motherboards. They tried very hard to get rid of SDRAM, by not extending any chipsets to PC 133.

When the Coppermine came out, they wanted to move people to the i820. It did outperform the 440BX, because the 440BX was 100 MHz, but once overclocked to 133 MHz, it was a different story. Intel released the low end 810, but withheld the i815 for quite some time to give the i820 some traction. But, the i820 was a mess. It performed marginally, and could only use three slots instead of the four, and of course, used grossly overpriced memory. Intel then put in some weird SDRAM bridge chip, I think it was called the MTH (memory translator hub), for the i820 and even i840, but it had bugs, and they eventually had to offer to replace the motherboards with "proper" RDRAM ones.

Whatever your experience is, it's anecdotal, and in fact Intel sold many machines with RDRAM. They had to, they had contractual obligations to. DDR for the Pentium III was far less common than RDRAM, having come along much later, and towards the end of the life of the Pentium III. It also was not supported by Intel's massive marketing muscle. But, RDRAM was, and despite being poorly suited for the Pentium III, was pushed on customers big time, so it would be ready for the Pentium 4.

VIA did suck, I had problems with their chipsets, but the Apollo Pro 266 is pretty solid. Their Super 7 stuff made me crazy, but then, ALI was even worse . I'm glad they aren't a big player outside of their own motherboards. I had problems with Nvidia chipsets too, though, and even Intel was far from perfect with their issues mentioned above. If Intel had made a decent chipset for the Tualatins, I would recommend them, but they didn't. The Apollo 266T is it, it has good performance, and can handle a lot of memory. The i815 was castrated to just allow 512MB, and isn't very good in dual processor configurations. Between the two, it's not a great choice, but it is an easy one.

 

[Guest]

To anyone thinking that the requirments are low, try it before talking.
I installed Windows 7 Beta under a VirtualBox VM (host computer is a laptop with a C2D T8300, 4GB of 667MHz DDR2 RAM, and a 7300RPM HDD - running Fedora 10 64 bits), with only 1.5GB of RAM, and using only one CPU core, and it ran quite decently. Not perfect, but very acceptable. The most noticeable slowdowns were mostly due to a lack of proper graphics acceleration, screen redraw were a bit slow/sluggish, otherwise performance was surpisingly good.
I would say that any computer that meets those minimum requirments should run 7 quite decently - except maybe for the processor. And netbooks, which I don't know much about performance-wise.

 

[kschoche]

[citation][nom]zingam[/nom]What a waste of resources. 1 GHz, 1GB... just for basic OS that does nothing... I bet that it is possible to create on OS that would offer everything an user needs and still run on 200MHz and 256Mb of RAM. Put more of these and you get more performance for your REAL applications that you use...[/citation]
Its called Linux.

 

[theuerkorn]

Microsoft must be pleased, as much publicity as every little posting gets. I mean, this can be easily summarized into one report, and yet there are many Windows 7 this Windows 7 that snippets. Yay!

 

[maximiza]

I don't really see the need to upgrade. My Vista 64 ultimate works smooth on my Opteron 185 (obsolete socket 939). I will still have DX11 so what then? What is all this W7 hoopla about? A new start menu? Will W7 cook me eggs in the morning?

 

[killmenow]

I am running dual Boot 64bit Win7-Beta2 & 64bit Vista-sp1.
Win7 in Beta is better that Vista in sp1

Before going from Vista 32 to 64, I read that the performance different was minimal, It's is very noticeable in general use, Don't know about games.

It's will be interesting to see how Win7 performs on a NoteBook, but it rocks on a Desktop, I have an E6750, and maybe for the very first time in my life, I'm happy with the speed (for general use). Now if they can fixup IE8 and spellcheck in Word, things will be looking good for Microsoft.

 

[jacobdrj]

I got my Abit BH6 up to a 1.4 GHz Tualtin and 768mb RAM on Windows 98 and XP, and I ran everything from a Voodoo 3 3000 to a Radeon 8500DV to a nVidia FX5900XT, and even had a 6xxx series card in there fore a while, before I sold the Tualtin chip and adapter (for the exact same price I bought it for) and upgraded to an Athlon X2...
I have a Q6600 now, and am not looking back. But I can't wait for 7. It runs so much smoother than Vista. I might upgrade to a SSD form a RAID 0 of raptors if all goes well.

 

[Kill@dor]

Yay!!!