Shopping for a new computer is giving me a headache, it's all so confusing.

Comments

• Your-Amish-Daddy The heart of Texas

  August 2008 edited August 2008

  Just like with radio transmitters, the frequency (gigahertz) is the actual signal. The clock speed is the rate that one clock cycle begins and ends. It doesn't get split, or shared or anything. It's almost useless now. With AMD squeezing high performance out of lower speeds, I'm waiting to see the first NEW 40Mhz processor.
  
  The clockspeed is the rise and fall rate. More rises and falls, more instructions can be processed. The cores, just crunch data. The clockspeed is universal.
  
  And stay away from Nvidia. Go ATI and get the same, if not better performance for a lower price tag.

  0
• Xendora

  August 2008 edited August 2008

  Your Amish Daddy wrote:

  Just like with radio transmitters, the frequency (gigahertz) is the actual signal. The clock speed is the rate that one clock cycle begins and ends. It doesn't get split, or shared or anything. It's almost useless now. With AMD squeezing high performance out of lower speeds, I'm waiting to see the first NEW 40Mhz processor.
  
  The clockspeed is the rise and fall rate. More rises and falls, more instructions can be processed. The cores, just crunch data. The clockspeed is universal.
  
  And stay away from Nvidia. Go ATI and get the same, if not better performance for a lower price tag.

  
  
  huh? ty for your answer but a lot of it...flew by my simple head. Is this a place just for tech people? If so I'll move on, no harm or hard feelings I promise. I just want to buy a new computer & hopefully make the correct choice.

  0
• Your-Amish-Daddy The heart of Texas

  August 2008 edited August 2008

  Yeah this is a tech site. Anyone's welcome though. I'll give it another shot..
  
  The clockspeed is the RPM of an engine. It's down to the Transmission (Cores) to put that power on the road.

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• Xendora

  August 2008 edited August 2008

  Your Amish Daddy wrote:

  Yeah this is a tech site. Anyone's welcome though. I'll give it another shot..
  
  The clockspeed is the RPM of an engine. It's down to the Transmission (Cores) to put that power on the road.

  
  
  Obviously I am in the wrong place...I am very sorry. Thought I made it clear I wasn't so tech-wise. OK...so where do we less informed but want to know people go?

  0
• Your-Amish-Daddy The heart of Texas

  August 2008 edited August 2008

  ARG!!! I'm trying my best. The clockspeed is like...Uh...The speedlimit, yeah! The speed limit. The cores are the cars. They all run at the same speed. Yeah that's it. Got it now?

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• Xendora

  August 2008 edited August 2008

  Your Amish Daddy wrote:

  ARG!!! I'm trying my best. The clockspeed is like...Uh...The speedlimit, yeah! The speed limit. The cores are the cars. They all run at the same speed. Yeah that's it. Got it now?

  
  now you know how I feel all the time...fun times isn't it?

  0
• Your-Amish-Daddy The heart of Texas

  August 2008 edited August 2008

  It's smashing really. I'm always stuck in neutral. I assume everyone's already got a nomenclature to computers. Makes me think.

  0
• Thrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian

  August 2008 edited August 2008

  Here is where I'm getting confused....what exactly is a dual core processor? I've managed to find a lot of articles...almost ALL of them being 2 or more years old saying what it does but what I don't get is how the Ghz it has is used. For example, if the processor has 3 Ghz does that mean each one gets 3 or do they split it? A few sellers claim it's for each meaning you'd get 6 Ghz. The majority don't make this claim.

  
  One of our former authors and members wrote an article that you may find useful for this question. The article details what dual core processors are, how they work and why they're beneficial. I will briefly summarize for you, though! A processor, in its most simple form, is composed of smaller parts that combine to form the "Core." The core is what computes all the things you do on your computer. Anything you do on your PC must be handled by the processor as the brain, just like your brain handles all the functions of your body. The processor's core fits inside a package, which is a bit like your skull.
  
  Now, as the pace of technology moves onwards, we are able to continuously reduce the amount of space that this core takes up. Simply, we just make them smaller by being more accurate with making them, and learning new techniques to make them with. While this is happening, the package roughly remains the same size. Eventually, these cores get small enough that we can fit two of them in a single package. We've reduced their size by 50%, and then some! It would be like taking your brain, shrinking it by 50%, keep all of its power (if not make it better), and then add another one that's just as powerful. Pretty awesome!
  
  Cores are advertised by speed, which you seen in GHz, or gigahertz. A single hertz can be equated to the CPU having one opportunity to solve math problems each second. That's all a CPU really is, a very fast and very powerful calculator. A megaherz is one million opportunities in a second, and a gigaherz is one thousand million opportunities in a second. Therefore, a 3.0GHz processor has three thousand million opportunities in a single second to solve equations. Wow! FAST!
  
  Each core in a processor runs at the speed advertised on the box. If it's a 2.6GHz dual core chip, each core is running at 2.6GHz individually. If it's a 3.0GHz quad core chip, there are four individual brains in one package each running at 3.0GHz. Now, here's where things get a bit fuzzy. A calculation that a processor does is called an "instruction," and every single hertz is called a "cycle." The cycle is where it has the opportunity to solve math problems, as we outlined above, but you can have multiple instructions solved with every cycle. This would be like solving four or five math problems at the same time, and being no slower than the person next to you who can only do one at a time. Processors work in very much the same way: Some processors can solve more instructions per cycle than others. This means that the speed of the chip (MHz/GHz) is not always a clear indicator of one chip being faster than another. The only way to know for sure is to do apples to apples comparisons with real testing software and applications that give us a clear answer.
  
  For example: In the early 2000s, Intel released a chip called the Pentium 4. You may have heard of it. It was scaled up to speeds well over 3GHz by the end of its lifetime, and many users ran it at faster-than-advertised speeds nearing 5GHz. Sounds pretty fast, right? Well, unfortunately, due to a horribly inefficient design, it is actually slower than today's 2.6GHz Core 2 Duo chips that you may have seen. The Pentium 4 could perform so few instructions per cycle that it is generally regarded as the worst chip designed in the last 20 years.
  
  So now it's important to know that within the lifetime of a chip's brand name, such as Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad, Athlon 64 or Phenom, there are multiple revisions. These multiple revisions are released in what's called "Steppings." Sometimes engineers for these marvelous CPUs advance their craft by just so much that it's worth their time to reengineer one of their existing CPUs to be a little bit faster, run a little bit cooler and be a little bit smaller. The revisions they make to the chips are not large enough to warrant a whole new CPU, but they're significant enough to produce in an updated version of the same model. This is just like a new model year for a car. It's received some minor enhancements that make the purchase compelling to newcomers, but they're not significant enough to produce a whole new car or entice (most) people to buy the new model year. This information is important, though, because you can be caught buying the old model year when the new one is better and just as cheap!
  
  It's important to note that new revisions and new generations of CPUs can actually increase the amount of instructions per cycle being calculated. Numerous engineering tricks go into making this happen, but the end result is that a 2.6GHz chip from 2008 can be over 200% faster than a 2.6GHz chip from 2004. The progress of technology has made them just that much more efficient! You would laugh to know that a 2.6GHz Pentium 4 would actually need to be running at close to a whopping 8GHz to match the speed of today's 3.0GHz Core 2 Duos. Same company, just four years later. Amazing stuff.
  
  Throughout the course of your future time on Icrontic, you may see words tossed around like "Yorkfield," "Penryn," "B3" or "Nehalem." These are the code names that CPU manufacturers use to identify these new steppings of existing CPUs, or entirely new chips. It's important to slowly learn these over time, especially if you're a budding enthusiast, because it's the talk of the trade and the only easy way to precisely identify what version of a chip people are talking about. It's one thing to say "Ford Mustang," but that's pretty vague, right? What if you said "1969 Ford Mustang BOSS 302?" That gets specific, and anyone who knows the subject will know what you're talking about. For the "Core 2 Duo" brand name, there have been several revisions that use the same brand name: Allendale, Conroe, Wolfdale. This is ordered from slowest to fastest. In the quad core chips, they simple took two dual core chips and put them in a single package to make a quad core. The first quad cores, called Kentsfield, combined two Conroe (A dual core CPU) into a single package. Then when Wolfdale was released, which was the next generation beyond the Conroe, they combined two of those to produce the very new Yorkfield quad core chip. AMD has their own unique engineering history as well. So, in short, we have a big mass of cores swimming around: How do they get leveraged?
  
  Just because there are multiple cores available to handle a load of work does not mean that they're being harnessed equally, or at all. The software that we use on our PCs must be specifically designed to take advantage of multiple cores in the chips. This is called "multi-threading" or "SMP aware." In software, a thread is nothing more than a line of reasoning an application is taking to give you a result. When and if you play video games, audio could be one thread and the graphics could be another. The overall performance will improve if the application is written to isolate these threads and give each one to a separate core to handle. Imagine how productive you could be if your body had two brains and was wired to write reports with both brains, with a different report on each hand. Pretty damn awesome, but it's not actually like that. More often than not, one core receives considerably more work than the other because most applications are not multi-threaded, or only very slightly. Windows itself is SMP-aware, and does a little bit of management on the behalf of applications to give you a boost, but not much. So really, it's not just 2x3GHz, or 1x3GHz, but some muddy and unidentifiable quantity in between. You just have to run tests and figure it out.
  
  Alright, so far we have learned that:
  A core is like a brain. Other parts of the PC (or your body) perform their fair share of work, but they all ultimately rely on the CPU.
  A core fits inside of a CPU package.
  The package can hold multiple cores when technology advances to such an extent that we can shrink them enough.
  A core operates in thousands and millions of cycles.
  Each cycle has the opportunity to solve multiple calculations, but some CPUs can solve more or less calculations than another.
  A processor core may use the same brand name and receive several revisions that enhance its performance.
  These revisions have a unique code name that can be used to identify them.
  More recent code names are generally faster, and may contain more cores.
  Increasing the number of cores may not increase speed, because applications must be written to take advantage of those cores.
  Most applications are pretty bad at handling multiple cores.
  

  Other things that confuse me are...RAM that come with "heat spreaders" whatever that is, lol. Is this important?

  
  Heat spreaders are strips of metal adhered to memory chips with a material that's capable of transferring heat. For most memory, heatspreaders are nothing more than a fancy aesthetic. Adding a beautiful paint job to your car will not make it go any faster, but it sure does look good. But there is particularly fast memory out there that is running at such a high voltage and such a high speed from the manufacturer, that the chips would simply die if they did not have a superior way of removing heat from themselves. Memory chips are encased in plastic, and obviously plastic is not very good at removing heat. Having these heatspreaders can really help the fast RAM.
  

  Fans, fans & more fans.....gotta have lots of fans! What is really needed for a system to run properly? All these cool & fancy cases out now with LEDs making it pretty but isn't that more power being used & more heat building up inside the case? If all the fans are sucking air in...dont' they suck in other things like dust, kitty hair & yeah I do smoke (trying to quit) so won't that affect things also?

  Yep, having a good air flow through a case is both a blessing AND a curse. Having what we call "good air flow" means that your fans are moving many cubic feet per minute of hot air from your case, and that the cold air is entering your case in a good spot, taking out the warm air in a smart spot. Drawing cold air in from the bottom front and exhausting the hot air out the top or the upper rear is a good basic system that everyone loves. But with high CFM (cubic feet/minute) comes the threat of cigarette smoke, kitty hair, dust, etcetera. Every month I dismantle my PC and clean it out so it's running in tip top shape. It's something that any good computer owner should do.
  

  More things...CPU cooling fans (again with the fans!), round cables instead of the flat "ribbon wire" type, lightscribe (what the heck is that?) upgrade for the DVD. Then there's the boast of a 1 gig ethernet card...does this make a difference in how fast your connection runs?

  
  Round cables are nothing more than ribbon cables that have been cut up and twisted into a round shape, then bound together with a rubber sheathe. In both cases, these kinds of cables are being phased out in favor of a new type of cable called Serial ATA. These are very small, thin, and flexible cables capable of carrying way more information than an old ribbon cable at 1/6th the size. They're a bit smaller than a tailorer's measuring tape in width, and about as thick as two sticks of gum stacked on top of one another. You can see a size comparison over here. Drives that use these cables are quickly replacing drives that use the older ribbon cable, which are called IDE drives. ON the same token, a drive that uses an SATA cable is a SATA drive. CD-ROMs, DVD burners and other optical drives are beginning to use these cables as well.
  
  Lightscribe
  When you burn a normal CD, you put it in the drive, wait for the burning software to finish writing your CD and you take it out. The process is finished. With Lightscribe, you have the opportunity to flip the CD over, put it back in your drive, and let the drive burn an image into the top of the disc with the drive's laser. You pick the image, and the drive will use its laser to activate a chemical coating on the top of the disk. The result is a relatively high resolution black and white representation of the image you have chosen etched into the CD. It's a neat replacement for those unwieldy CD labelers and labels you see at stores.
  
  Gigabit Ethernet
  Everything related to storing, downloading and uploading data on a PC starts with a byte. A kilobyte is a thousand bytes. A megabyte is a million bytes. A gigabyte is one billion bytes. Now, your average internet connection can download at around 600 to 1000 kilobytes per second. That's approximately one half to one whole megabyte per second. A gigabit ethernet connection can receive information at speeds up to 100 megabytes per second, or 100 to 200 times the speed of your average internet connection. Having a faster network card won't increase your download speed because, as you can see, download speeds are only a fraction of what the card can handle. The benefit of having a better card allows you to transfer files more quickly from computer to computer inside your own home.
  
  so hopefully this post has cleared up many of the questions that you've had today.
  
  If it has, we can start over:
  
  Welcome to Icrontic Xendora. I see that you have about $700 to spend on a new PC? What sort of things do you like to do on your computer, and would you be comfortable putting one of your own together from individual parts?

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• Tim Southwest PA Icrontian

  August 2008 edited August 2008

  If I had $700 to spend on a new PC, eBay is the LAST place I'd go. I'd order certain parts from Newegg or Tiger Direct and custom build my own system.
  
  I have specced out a new system for myself recently, and it came to just under $700 in parts.
  
  And one more important thing: YOU DO NOT WANT VISTA!!!!! VISTA SUCKS!!!!!
  
  Use Windows XP. Better performance and uses far less system resources to do it.

  0
• revorocks England, East Sussex, Hove Member

  August 2008 edited August 2008

  Am i right by saying the pentuim 4 had a really bad architecture? as the core 2 duo has a much better one.
  
  If i am ive always found that this example is a brilliant way of explaing.
  
  
  Imagine the pentuim 4 at 3.2ghz is represented by a profesional runner who can run really fast.
  
  The slower clock speed core 2 duo at 2.2ghz is represented by an old man who can run pretty slowly.
  
  that is your clock speed. Now say to perform a calulation the fast runner has to run 1 mile. to perform the same calculation, the old man only has to run 10 meters. this is because he is more efficiant.
  
  Who would win?
  The old man (core 2 duo).
  
  the pentium 4 can run faster than the Core 2 duo but has to run much further to complete the same tasks, thus the core 2 duo is a faster cpu.
  
  yes these examples are extreme but im just using them to give you an idea of what difference clock speeds and how good the architecture is can make.
  
  Hope i got this right, if not sorry :P

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• revorocks England, East Sussex, Hove Member

  August 2008 edited August 2008

  Thrax wrote:

  One of our former authors and members wrote an article that you may find useful for this question. The article details what dual core processors are, how they work and why they're beneficial. I will briefly summarize for you, though! A processor, in its most simple form, is composed of smaller parts that combine to form the "Core." The core is what computes all the things you do on your computer. Anything you do on your PC must be handled by the processor as the brain, just like your brain handles all the functions of your body. The processor's core fits inside a package, which is a bit like your skull.
  
  Now, as the pace of technology moves onwards, we are able to continuously reduce the amount of space that this core takes up. Simply, we just make them smaller by being more accurate with making them, and learning new techniques to make them with. While this is happening, the package roughly remains the same size. Eventually, these cores get small enough that we can fit two of them in a single package. We've reduced their size by 50%, and then some! It would be like taking your brain, shrinking it by 50%, keep all of its power (if not make it better), and then add another one that's just as powerful. Pretty awesome!
  
  Cores are advertised by speed, which you seen in GHz, or gigahertz. A single hertz can be equated to the CPU having one opportunity to solve math problems each second. That's all a CPU really is, a very fast and very powerful calculator. A megaherz is one million opportunities in a second, and a gigaherz is one thousand million opportunities in a second. Therefore, a 3.0GHz processor has three thousand million opportunities in a single second to solve equations. Wow! FAST!
  
  Each core in a processor runs at the speed advertised on the box. If it's a 2.6GHz dual core chip, each core is running at 2.6GHz individually. If it's a 3.0GHz quad core chip, there are four individual brains in one package each running at 3.0GHz. Now, here's where things get a bit fuzzy. A calculation that a processor does is called an "instruction," and every single hertz is called a "cycle." The cycle is where it has the opportunity to solve math problems, as we outlined above, but you can have multiple instructions solved with every cycle. This would be like solving four or five math problems at the same time, and being no slower than the person next to you who can only do one at a time. Processors work in very much the same way: Some processors can solve more instructions per cycle than others. This means that the speed of the chip (MHz/GHz) is not always a clear indicator of one chip being faster than another. The only way to know for sure is to do apples to apples comparisons with real testing software and applications that give us a clear answer.
  
  For example: In the early 2000s, Intel released a chip called the Pentium 4. You may have heard of it. It was scaled up to speeds well over 3GHz by the end of its lifetime, and many users ran it at faster-than-advertised speeds nearing 5GHz. Sounds pretty fast, right? Well, unfortunately, due to a horribly inefficient design, it is actually slower than today's 2.6GHz Core 2 Duo chips that you may have seen. The Pentium 4 could perform so few instructions per cycle that it is generally regarded as the worst chip designed in the last 20 years.
  
  So now it's important to know that within the lifetime of a chip's brand name, such as Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad, Athlon 64 or Phenom, there are multiple revisions. These multiple revisions are released in what's called "Steppings." Sometimes engineers for these marvelous CPUs advance their craft by just so much that it's worth their time to reengineer one of their existing CPUs to be a little bit faster, run a little bit cooler and be a little bit smaller. The revisions they make to the chips are not large enough to warrant a whole new CPU, but they're significant enough to produce in an updated version of the same model. This is just like a new model year for a car. It's received some minor enhancements that make the purchase compelling to newcomers, but they're not significant enough to produce a whole new car or entice (most) people to buy the new model year. This information is important, though, because you can be caught buying the old model year when the new one is better and just as cheap!
  
  It's important to note that new revisions and new generations of CPUs can actually increase the amount of instructions per cycle being calculated. Numerous engineering tricks go into making this happen, but the end result is that a 2.6GHz chip from 2008 can be over 200% faster than a 2.6GHz chip from 2004. The progress of technology has made them just that much more efficient! You would laugh to know that a 2.6GHz Pentium 4 would actually need to be running at close to a whopping 8GHz to match the speed of today's 3.0GHz Core 2 Duos. Same company, just four years later. Amazing stuff.
  
  Throughout the course of your future time on Icrontic, you may see words tossed around like "Yorkfield," "Penryn," "B3" or "Nehalem." These are the code names that CPU manufacturers use to identify these new steppings of existing CPUs, or entirely new chips. It's important to slowly learn these over time, especially if you're a budding enthusiast, because it's the talk of the trade and the only easy way to precisely identify what version of a chip people are talking about. It's one thing to say "Ford Mustang," but that's pretty vague, right? What if you said "1969 Ford Mustang BOSS 302?" That gets specific, and anyone who knows the subject will know what you're talking about. For the "Core 2 Duo" brand name, there have been several revisions that use the same brand name: Allendale, Conroe, Wolfdale. This is ordered from slowest to fastest. In the quad core chips, they simple took two dual core chips and put them in a single package to make a quad core. The first quad cores, called Kentsfield, combined two Conroe (A dual core CPU) into a single package. Then when Wolfdale was released, which was the next generation beyond the Conroe, they combined two of those to produce the very new Yorkfield quad core chip. AMD has their own unique engineering history as well. So, in short, we have a big mass of cores swimming around: How do they get leveraged?
  
  Just because there are multiple cores available to handle a load of work does not mean that they're being harnessed equally, or at all. The software that we use on our PCs must be specifically designed to take advantage of multiple cores in the chips. This is called "multi-threading" or "SMP aware." In software, a thread is nothing more than a line of reasoning an application is taking to give you a result. When and if you play video games, audio could be one thread and the graphics could be another. The overall performance will improve if the application is written to isolate these threads and give each one to a separate core to handle. Imagine how productive you could be if your body had two brains and was wired to write reports with both brains, with a different report on each hand. Pretty damn awesome, but it's not actually like that. More often than not, one core receives considerably more work than the other because most applications are not multi-threaded, or only very slightly. Windows itself is SMP-aware, and does a little bit of management on the behalf of applications to give you a boost, but not much. So really, it's not just 2x3GHz, or 1x3GHz, but some muddy and unidentifiable quantity in between. You just have to run tests and figure it out.
  
  Alright, so far we have learned that:
  A core is like a brain. Other parts of the PC (or your body) perform their fair share of work, but they all ultimately rely on the CPU.
  A core fits inside of a CPU package.
  The package can hold multiple cores when technology advances to such an extent that we can shrink them enough.
  A core operates in thousands and millions of cycles.
  Each cycle has the opportunity to solve multiple calculations, but some CPUs can solve more or less calculations than another.
  A processor core may use the same brand name and receive several revisions that enhance its performance.
  These revisions have a unique code name that can be used to identify them.
  More recent code names are generally faster, and may contain more cores.
  Increasing the number of cores may not increase speed, because applications must be written to take advantage of those cores.
  Most applications are pretty bad at handling multiple cores.
  
  
  
  Heat spreaders are strips of metal adhered to memory chips with a material that's capable of transferring heat. For most memory, heatspreaders are nothing more than a fancy aesthetic. Adding a beautiful paint job to your car will not make it go any faster, but it sure does look good. But there is particularly fast memory out there that is running at such a high voltage and such a high speed from the manufacturer, that the chips would simply die if they did not have a superior way of removing heat from themselves. Memory chips are encased in plastic, and obviously plastic is not very good at removing heat. Having these heatspreaders can really help the fast RAM.
  
  
  Yep, having a good air flow through a case is both a blessing AND a curse. Having what we call "good air flow" means that your fans are moving many cubic feet per minute of hot air from your case, and that the cold air is entering your case in a good spot, taking out the warm air in a smart spot. Drawing cold air in from the bottom front and exhausting the hot air out the top or the upper rear is a good basic system that everyone loves. But with high CFM (cubic feet/minute) comes the threat of cigarette smoke, kitty hair, dust, etcetera. Every month I dismantle my PC and clean it out so it's running in tip top shape. It's something that any good computer owner should do.
  
  
  
  Round cables are nothing more than ribbon cables that have been cut up and twisted into a round shape, then bound together with a rubber sheathe. In both cases, these kinds of cables are being phased out in favor of a new type of cable called Serial ATA. These are very small, thin, and flexible cables capable of carrying way more information than an old ribbon cable at 1/6th the size. They're a bit smaller than a tailorer's measuring tape in width, and about as thick as two sticks of gum stacked on top of one another. You can see a size comparison over here. Drives that use these cables are quickly replacing drives that use the older ribbon cable, which are called IDE drives. ON the same token, a drive that uses an SATA cable is a SATA drive. CD-ROMs, DVD burners and other optical drives are beginning to use these cables as well.
  
  Lightscribe
  When you burn a normal CD, you put it in the drive, wait for the burning software to finish writing your CD and you take it out. The process is finished. With Lightscribe, you have the opportunity to flip the CD over, put it back in your drive, and let the drive burn an image into the top of the disc with the drive's laser. You pick the image, and the drive will use its laser to activate a chemical coating on the top of the disk. The result is a relatively high resolution black and white representation of the image you have chosen etched into the CD. It's a neat replacement for those unwieldy CD labelers and labels you see at stores.
  
  Gigabit Ethernet
  Everything related to storing, downloading and uploading data on a PC starts with a byte. A kilobyte is a thousand bytes. A megabyte is a million bytes. A gigabyte is one billion bytes. Now, your average internet connection can download at around 600 to 1000 kilobytes per second. That's approximately one half to one whole megabyte per second. A gigabit ethernet connection can receive information at speeds up to 100 megabytes per second, or 100 to 200 times the speed of your average internet connection. Having a faster network card won't increase your download speed because, as you can see, download speeds are only a fraction of what the card can handle. The benefit of having a better card allows you to transfer files more quickly from computer to computer inside your own home.
  
  so hopefully this post has cleared up many of the questions that you've had today.
  
  If it has, we can start over:
  
  Welcome to Icrontic Xendora. I see that you have about $700 to spend on a new PC? What sort of things do you like to do on your computer, and would you be comfortable putting one of your own together from individual parts?

  
  
  Ohh and Thrax did you type all that article?
  
  If so then very good job! Helped me under stand more about cpu's than i did before.
  
  Nice work

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• Thrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian

  August 2008 edited August 2008

  Yeah, I typed it.

  0
• edcentric near Milwaukee, Wisconsin Icrontian

  August 2008 edited August 2008

  Just a few questions?
  What OS is your current machine running?
  What games do you play most?
  Will you need a monitor, keyboard, mouse?
  
  Are you willing to learn to build your own computer?
  Most of us that are active here build our own machines. We range in age from teens to 60's. And we have built anywhere from 1 machine to a dozen.
  
  In general, today the best option for a reasonable balance between cost and performance is to go with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor.
  Beyond that everything becomes a set of delicate trade-offs.
  http://www.anandtech.com/guides/showdoc.aspx?i=3148
  This is a well written article (getting a bit old though) that walks you through the selection process.
  
  Let us help you. And don't get too put off by short answers of ones that you don't understand. Just keep asking. The more specific your questions the better your answers will be.

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• Xendora

  August 2008 edited August 2008

  Thrax wrote:

  Yeah, I typed it.

  
  
  Yes you did...never thought other wise. Thank you Thrax!! A LOT of what you said, I understood. I especially liked your reply about heat spreaders...not a worry for me now.
  
  
  Sorry for the drama guys, I spend 90% of my time here at home (on disability) and sometimes I let it get to me. I see a couple replies I need to address, will do that now. ~Xen

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• Xendora

  August 2008 edited August 2008

  Tim wrote:

  If I had $700 to spend on a new PC, eBay is the LAST place I'd go. I'd order certain parts from Newegg or Tiger Direct and custom build my own system.
  
  I have specced out a new system for myself recently, and it came to just under $700 in parts.
  
  And one more important thing: YOU DO NOT WANT VISTA!!!!! VISTA SUCKS!!!!!
  
  Use Windows XP. Better performance and uses far less system resources to do it.

  
  I have considered this, not sure I can do it though. If you sent me a box full of stuff (that is compatible with each other) with directions on how to put it together, yes I could do it, I have no doubt in my mind. Well....cept maybe the jumpers on the MB, lol.
  
  BTW Tim..adding you to my "2 word reply" about Vista, lol. That is all I get from Vista users......."it sucks" but the good news is, you're just as cool as my big bro on this particular category. ((hugs)) ~Xen

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• Xendora

  August 2008 edited August 2008

  edcentric wrote:

  Just a few questions?
  What OS is your current machine running?
  What games do you play most?
  Will you need a monitor, keyboard, mouse?
  
  Are you willing to learn to build your own computer?
  Most of us that are active here build our own machines. We range in age from teens to 60's. And we have built anywhere from 1 machine to a dozen.
  
  In general, today the best option for a reasonable balance between cost and performance is to go with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor.
  Beyond that everything becomes a set of delicate trade-offs.
  http://www.anandtech.com/guides/showdoc.aspx?i=3148
  This is a well written article (getting a bit old though) that walks you through the selection process.
  
  Let us help you. And don't get too put off by short answers of ones that you don't understand. Just keep asking. The more specific your questions the better your answers will be.

  
  Hi there. I am currently using XP Pro...but atm I have some issues regarding missing DLL files. I can pretty much do what I always have but can't use directed keys on my keyboard, accesss inf about my computer, use joystick (nephew isn't happy about that!) etc. I can do all I was doing though...so far. Once I get my new computer I will set up my old system for him to play on, maybe do web searches while I'm gaming. Oh yes, what games do I play....EverQuest & Pogo for the most part. Sometmes I play at iSketch.
  
  Yes eventually I will need a new keyboard....would like to replace my monitor with a cool & wider LCD.

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• Tim Southwest PA Icrontian

  August 2008 edited August 2008

  Here's my analogy for describing the older inefficient cpus compared to newer slower more effienct ones.
  
  A 10 speed bike.
  
  An inefficient cpu, like the old P4's, is like riding the 10 speed in low gear. To go fast you have to rev the hell out of the pedals. Making a lot of excess work and heat for you. Just like cranking the clock speeds to 3.6 Ghz+ on P4's.
  
  More efficient cpus, like the Athlon XPs and newer Core 2 whatevers use higher gears on the 10 speed. More efficient, more wheel turns per turn of the pedals.

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• Shorty Manchester, UK Icrontian

  August 2008 edited August 2008

  Thrax wrote:

  One of our former authors and members wrote an article that you may find useful for this question. The article details what dual core processors are, how they work and why they're beneficial. I will briefly summarize for you, though! A processor, in its most simple form, is composed of smaller parts that combine to form the "Core." The core is what computes all the things you do on your computer. Anything you do on your PC must be handled by the processor as the brain, just like your brain handles all the functions of your body. The processor's core fits inside a package, which is a bit like your skull.
  
  Now, as the pace of technology moves onwards, we are able to continuously reduce the amount of space that this core takes up. Simply, we just make them smaller by being more accurate with making them, and learning new techniques to make them with. While this is happening, the package roughly remains the same size. Eventually, these cores get small enough that we can fit two of them in a single package. We've reduced their size by 50%, and then some! It would be like taking your brain, shrinking it by 50%, keep all of its power (if not make it better), and then add another one that's just as powerful. Pretty awesome!
  
  Cores are advertised by speed, which you seen in GHz, or gigahertz. A single hertz can be equated to the CPU having one opportunity to solve math problems each second. That's all a CPU really is, a very fast and very powerful calculator. A megaherz is one million opportunities in a second, and a gigaherz is one thousand million opportunities in a second. Therefore, a 3.0GHz processor has three thousand million opportunities in a single second to solve equations. Wow! FAST!
  
  Each core in a processor runs at the speed advertised on the box. If it's a 2.6GHz dual core chip, each core is running at 2.6GHz individually. If it's a 3.0GHz quad core chip, there are four individual brains in one package each running at 3.0GHz. Now, here's where things get a bit fuzzy. A calculation that a processor does is called an "instruction," and every single hertz is called a "cycle." The cycle is where it has the opportunity to solve math problems, as we outlined above, but you can have multiple instructions solved with every cycle. This would be like solving four or five math problems at the same time, and being no slower than the person next to you who can only do one at a time. Processors work in very much the same way: Some processors can solve more instructions per cycle than others. This means that the speed of the chip (MHz/GHz) is not always a clear indicator of one chip being faster than another. The only way to know for sure is to do apples to apples comparisons with real testing software and applications that give us a clear answer.
  
  For example: In the early 2000s, Intel released a chip called the Pentium 4. You may have heard of it. It was scaled up to speeds well over 3GHz by the end of its lifetime, and many users ran it at faster-than-advertised speeds nearing 5GHz. Sounds pretty fast, right? Well, unfortunately, due to a horribly inefficient design, it is actually slower than today's 2.6GHz Core 2 Duo chips that you may have seen. The Pentium 4 could perform so few instructions per cycle that it is generally regarded as the worst chip designed in the last 20 years.
  
  So now it's important to know that within the lifetime of a chip's brand name, such as Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad, Athlon 64 or Phenom, there are multiple revisions. These multiple revisions are released in what's called "Steppings." Sometimes engineers for these marvelous CPUs advance their craft by just so much that it's worth their time to reengineer one of their existing CPUs to be a little bit faster, run a little bit cooler and be a little bit smaller. The revisions they make to the chips are not large enough to warrant a whole new CPU, but they're significant enough to produce in an updated version of the same model. This is just like a new model year for a car. It's received some minor enhancements that make the purchase compelling to newcomers, but they're not significant enough to produce a whole new car or entice (most) people to buy the new model year. This information is important, though, because you can be caught buying the old model year when the new one is better and just as cheap!
  
  It's important to note that new revisions and new generations of CPUs can actually increase the amount of instructions per cycle being calculated. Numerous engineering tricks go into making this happen, but the end result is that a 2.6GHz chip from 2008 can be over 200% faster than a 2.6GHz chip from 2004. The progress of technology has made them just that much more efficient! You would laugh to know that a 2.6GHz Pentium 4 would actually need to be running at close to a whopping 8GHz to match the speed of today's 3.0GHz Core 2 Duos. Same company, just four years later. Amazing stuff.
  
  Throughout the course of your future time on Icrontic, you may see words tossed around like "Yorkfield," "Penryn," "B3" or "Nehalem." These are the code names that CPU manufacturers use to identify these new steppings of existing CPUs, or entirely new chips. It's important to slowly learn these over time, especially if you're a budding enthusiast, because it's the talk of the trade and the only easy way to precisely identify what version of a chip people are talking about. It's one thing to say "Ford Mustang," but that's pretty vague, right? What if you said "1969 Ford Mustang BOSS 302?" That gets specific, and anyone who knows the subject will know what you're talking about. For the "Core 2 Duo" brand name, there have been several revisions that use the same brand name: Allendale, Conroe, Wolfdale. This is ordered from slowest to fastest. In the quad core chips, they simple took two dual core chips and put them in a single package to make a quad core. The first quad cores, called Kentsfield, combined two Conroe (A dual core CPU) into a single package. Then when Wolfdale was released, which was the next generation beyond the Conroe, they combined two of those to produce the very new Yorkfield quad core chip. AMD has their own unique engineering history as well. So, in short, we have a big mass of cores swimming around: How do they get leveraged?
  
  Just because there are multiple cores available to handle a load of work does not mean that they're being harnessed equally, or at all. The software that we use on our PCs must be specifically designed to take advantage of multiple cores in the chips. This is called "multi-threading" or "SMP aware." In software, a thread is nothing more than a line of reasoning an application is taking to give you a result. When and if you play video games, audio could be one thread and the graphics could be another. The overall performance will improve if the application is written to isolate these threads and give each one to a separate core to handle. Imagine how productive you could be if your body had two brains and was wired to write reports with both brains, with a different report on each hand. Pretty damn awesome, but it's not actually like that. More often than not, one core receives considerably more work than the other because most applications are not multi-threaded, or only very slightly. Windows itself is SMP-aware, and does a little bit of management on the behalf of applications to give you a boost, but not much. So really, it's not just 2x3GHz, or 1x3GHz, but some muddy and unidentifiable quantity in between. You just have to run tests and figure it out.
  
  Alright, so far we have learned that:
  A core is like a brain. Other parts of the PC (or your body) perform their fair share of work, but they all ultimately rely on the CPU.
  A core fits inside of a CPU package.
  The package can hold multiple cores when technology advances to such an extent that we can shrink them enough.
  A core operates in thousands and millions of cycles.
  Each cycle has the opportunity to solve multiple calculations, but some CPUs can solve more or less calculations than another.
  A processor core may use the same brand name and receive several revisions that enhance its performance.
  These revisions have a unique code name that can be used to identify them.
  More recent code names are generally faster, and may contain more cores.
  Increasing the number of cores may not increase speed, because applications must be written to take advantage of those cores.
  Most applications are pretty bad at handling multiple cores.
  
  
  
  Heat spreaders are strips of metal adhered to memory chips with a material that's capable of transferring heat. For most memory, heatspreaders are nothing more than a fancy aesthetic. Adding a beautiful paint job to your car will not make it go any faster, but it sure does look good. But there is particularly fast memory out there that is running at such a high voltage and such a high speed from the manufacturer, that the chips would simply die if they did not have a superior way of removing heat from themselves. Memory chips are encased in plastic, and obviously plastic is not very good at removing heat. Having these heatspreaders can really help the fast RAM.
  
  
  Yep, having a good air flow through a case is both a blessing AND a curse. Having what we call "good air flow" means that your fans are moving many cubic feet per minute of hot air from your case, and that the cold air is entering your case in a good spot, taking out the warm air in a smart spot. Drawing cold air in from the bottom front and exhausting the hot air out the top or the upper rear is a good basic system that everyone loves. But with high CFM (cubic feet/minute) comes the threat of cigarette smoke, kitty hair, dust, etcetera. Every month I dismantle my PC and clean it out so it's running in tip top shape. It's something that any good computer owner should do.
  
  
  
  Round cables are nothing more than ribbon cables that have been cut up and twisted into a round shape, then bound together with a rubber sheathe. In both cases, these kinds of cables are being phased out in favor of a new type of cable called Serial ATA. These are very small, thin, and flexible cables capable of carrying way more information than an old ribbon cable at 1/6th the size. They're a bit smaller than a tailorer's measuring tape in width, and about as thick as two sticks of gum stacked on top of one another. You can see a size comparison over here. Drives that use these cables are quickly replacing drives that use the older ribbon cable, which are called IDE drives. ON the same token, a drive that uses an SATA cable is a SATA drive. CD-ROMs, DVD burners and other optical drives are beginning to use these cables as well.
  
  Lightscribe
  When you burn a normal CD, you put it in the drive, wait for the burning software to finish writing your CD and you take it out. The process is finished. With Lightscribe, you have the opportunity to flip the CD over, put it back in your drive, and let the drive burn an image into the top of the disc with the drive's laser. You pick the image, and the drive will use its laser to activate a chemical coating on the top of the disk. The result is a relatively high resolution black and white representation of the image you have chosen etched into the CD. It's a neat replacement for those unwieldy CD labelers and labels you see at stores.
  
  Gigabit Ethernet
  Everything related to storing, downloading and uploading data on a PC starts with a byte. A kilobyte is a thousand bytes. A megabyte is a million bytes. A gigabyte is one billion bytes. Now, your average internet connection can download at around 600 to 1000 kilobytes per second. That's approximately one half to one whole megabyte per second. A gigabit ethernet connection can receive information at speeds up to 100 megabytes per second, or 100 to 200 times the speed of your average internet connection. Having a faster network card won't increase your download speed because, as you can see, download speeds are only a fraction of what the card can handle. The benefit of having a better card allows you to transfer files more quickly from computer to computer inside your own home.
  
  so hopefully this post has cleared up many of the questions that you've had today.
  
  If it has, we can start over:
  
  Welcome to Icrontic Xendora. I see that you have about $700 to spend on a new PC? What sort of things do you like to do on your computer, and would you be comfortable putting one of your own together from individual parts?

  
  Readers... Icrontics definition of EPIC right there

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• lemonlime Canada Member

  August 2008 edited August 2008

  I smell an article
  
  Well said, Thrax

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• edcentric near Milwaukee, Wisconsin Icrontian

  August 2008 edited August 2008

  Xendora, Choosing to build your won computer won't save you a lot of money. It will get you a machine that is more robust and better suited to your usage.
  As an example, if you build a machine we would assist you in selecting a good power supply (PSU). In common mass market machines PSU failures are common and often damage other parts when they fail.
  The parts list isn't very long: processor (CPU), memory, motherboard (mobo), case, PSU, video card, hard drive (hdd), and an optical drive.
  If you want to do you could start another thread titled "help me select parts", state your intended usage and budget, and we will fall all over ourselves recommending hardware.

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• Xendora

  August 2008 edited August 2008

  edcentric wrote:

  Xendora, Choosing to build your won computer won't save you a lot of money. It will get you a machine that is more robust and better suited to your usage.
  As an example, if you build a machine we would assist you in selecting a good power supply (PSU). In common mass market machines PSU failures are common and often damage other parts when they fail.
  The parts list isn't very long: processor (CPU), memory, motherboard (mobo), case, PSU, video card, hard drive (hdd), and an optical drive.
  If you want to do you could start another thread titled "help me select parts", state your intended usage and budget, and we will fall all over ourselves recommending hardware.

  
  
  Hi edcentric, The more I think about it the more tempted I am to build my own system. I'd be lying if I said it doesn't make me nervous but on the flip side....wow, I'd be so proud of myself!! Not to mention it would give me something to do here at home. I think what you're saying as far as saving money goes is I'd at least get more "bang for my buck" if I were to do it myself...with you all coaching me of course. If I were able to save even $100 I could apply it to a flat panel in another month or so. Also, I have 1/2 my budget money already saved & could start ordering things right away.
  
  BTW....I've had 2 things go wrong in the 4 years I've had the computer I have now & 1 was the PSU blew out. I think it happened because I added a graphics card & it eventually wore the PSU out. I had it replaced with one that had more wattage than what I'd ever need & was so happy with how much quieter it runs too. Other thing was my CD drive stopped burning CDs but the seller sent me another one to replace it free of charge. I thought computer cases came with the PSU included, true or not true?
  
  I'm going to start a new post as you suggested & see what replies I get about building my own system. I'm really leaning towards building my own system & if nothing else I know I'll learn from it. Thanks for the reply. ~Xen

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• -MBG--De-Sniper Alaska

  August 2008 edited August 2008

  some cases come with power supplies some dont just depends what the seller included.

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