This article CS5: Should You Upgrade? ANIMOTION (http://www.animotion.nl/en/blog/cs5-should-you-upgrade/) mentions the following


Benefits
64bit: In a 32bit program, the maximum memory (RAM) that can be used is 3 GB. Photoshop, Premiere Pro and After Effects CS5 are 64bit programs and can use all of the memory in your computer. This makes the program more stable and faster, especially with complex projects.


Can anyone confirm this? I'm on the fence about upgrading because I only have 4gb of ram.

I can confirm that I can use cs5 on my Toshiba qusmio celeron laptop with 2 gb ram - cs4 cannot playback any HD files - no problem in CS5. My experience is that my computers that cannot handle cs 4 - works with cs5. Offcourse this will not do on all computers that cannot handle cs4 - like a 286 with 4 Mb ram.....
You gain a lot, just getting a 64 bit program.

Wow! That is interesting.

This article CS5: Should You Upgrade? ANIMOTION (http://www.animotion.nl/en/blog/cs5-should-you-upgrade/) mentions the following


Benefits
64bit: In a 32bit program, the maximum memory (RAM) that can be used is 3 GB. Photoshop, Premiere Pro and After Effects CS5 are 64bit programs and can use all of the memory in your computer. This makes the program more stable and faster, especially with complex projects.


Can anyone confirm this? I'm on the fence about upgrading because I only have 4gb of ram.

Premiere Pro CS5 can use all of that RAM - and the more RAM you add, the better. In fact, with only 4GB of RAM installed, CS5 does not run sufficiently better/faster than CS4 to justify the upgrade.

Actually, I found the Mercury Playback Engine to be worth the price of the upgrade from CS4 to CS5, even on a Dual Core system with only 4 Gigs of RAM. Drop in a NVidia card with CUDA support and CS5 will really perform better than CS4. I did this with a couple of our older Dual Core systems.

I'm on the fence with this one...

Do i upgrade to CS5 on my older HP workstation?
I'd gladly drop the Matrox card for a Cuda card if i felt comforatable knowing that my system could run faster.

I'm cutting HDV for the most part....