In this paper, the transceiver performance of optical 64QAM-OFDM signals with different sub-car- riers is studied. Firstly, we build a 40Gbit/s optical coherent 64QAM-OFDM transmission system. 64QAM-OFDM optical signals with 16, 32, 64, 64, 128, 256 and 512 sub-carriers are transmitted over 100 km single mode fiber (SMF). Then, the optical spectrum diagrams before and after transmission, the bit error rate (BER) and constellation diagrams of received signals were compared. The simulation results show that, with the number of sub-carriers increasing, the value of PAPR will gradually increase and the quality of the received optical signals will deteriorate. Moreover, with the number of sub-carriers increasing, the computational complexity will increase when digital signal processing (DSP) is used. Therefore, we should choose the optimal number of sub-carriers, and the PAPR influence and BER are also considered for achieving effective transmission.