which processor?

[da SLUG man]

how do you tell what processors better than another these days??

in my day they wnet 386, 486, then pentium and had the speed written on them

i had a pentium 75mhz!!!... it was the ferrari of the day!!

my laptop is an intel dual core, which i think means it has 2 processors in one chip working together to double the speed???


but looking at new processor chips, they jut seem to be a random mix of numbers with no obvious way of telling which is better, or what they do!!

so far, i've been looking by the prices. guessing that the more expensive is gonna be better???


ANY IDEAS???

[Albannach]

Expensive isn't always better, faster isn't always better either. Things are complicated nowadays.

Have a look at Custom PC's website (their Elite guide), should make chosing easier.

[dieselboy]

you could have a really good cpu and a crap motherboard, therefore you have a crap system that will perform as slow as a crap cpu.

if you going to build a good system, quad core intel is the way to go.

choose a decent motherboard with a decent bus speed and bandwidth

you WILL need decent ram if your going to build a decent pc. so if your going to have 4gb ram, buy two 2gb sticks. if you can do with 2gb ram, buy two 1gb sticks.


you WILL need a SATA hard drive, possibly two. make sure you dont buy anything slower than 7000rpm. preferable 10000rpm.

make sure you get some decent cooling, big slow fans = quiet pc.

get a decent make PSU, so that you dont blow up the thing. again, BIG fans = QUIET, so i bought a Corsair modulular unit with a high output. the standard same wattage psu i had before hand used to make strange noises, and give power spikes! and although it was rated at 450W it wasnt doing that at all.


of course, you can buy cheap stuff, and upgrade along the way.

the thing is, if you buy good of one thing, then the others could hold you back.

if all your wanting to do is surf the net, then you dont need such a pc. you can build a budget pc for less than £200.


i have built a dual core AMD machine (overclocked to 2.8ghz from 2ghz), with a high HT speed mobo (overclocked to 1150Mhz), and two 1gb OCZ ram (overclocked to 280Mhz (im only using ddr1 because of cost at the time of chosing the kit almost 2 years ago) - the reason you use two sticks instead of more is to reduce load on the memory controller which in my case is in the cpu, and to get dual channel memory.

now my limiting factor when copying files, converting films to dvd or vice versa is the hard drive speed. it has a write speed of 40mb/s so it can hold it back at times.

i run vista, which doesnt seem to have any issues with spanning accross both cores. so with some applications i get to have double 2.8ghz


the best thing to do, is work out what you are going to actually use it for, and then build a pc to suit, with room for upgrading in the future so it doesnt fall back.

[dieselboy]

if your really going for it, and you do a lot of converting work for films etc and want them done in the quickest of time,
you can buy a mobo with 2x pci-e slots so you can have SLI cards installed.
THEN buy two of the fastest NVIDIA graphics cards and install them
THEN once you have finished overclocking the pc, you overclock both the GPUs on the graphics cards
THEN you run software to not use the GPUs for graphics, but instead use them to actually do work for you, along with the cpu of the pc.
think i see each card at 1.4ghz on someones OC.

this means you can have a dual quad cpu machine (2 cpu's with 4 cores) these can overclock to like 4ghz or something stupid which means 32ghz of processing power.
plus the 2.8ghz of gpu power, and it should convert dvds in no time.

[da SLUG man]

i've got a pc from a fella at work... no idea what it is!...

hoovered it out!

now i wanna use it as the base to make a decent all rounder a bit at a time.

the usual, interweb, games (nothing serious), music, films and PVR... basically an all round entertainment pc.

just don't understand the numbers on the cpus.... on an AMD quad core 6600, what does the 6600, 5400 etc actually refer to??

[AlexT]

i've got a pc from a fella at work... no idea what it is!...

hoovered it out!

now i wanna use it as the base to make a decent all rounder a bit at a time.

the usual, interweb, games (nothing serious), music, films and PVR... basically an all round entertainment pc.

just don't understand the numbers on the cpus.... on an AMD quad core 6600, what does the 6600, 5400 etc actually refer to??

they've become model numbers now

used to mean something long ago! a pentium 133 had 133 mhz.

the q6600 is actualy made by intel and defaults to 2.4ghz across the four cores it's just a model number. they're great processors and quite cheap to come by these days!

[dieselboy]

is it definately AMD or is it intel?
not sure if amd did a 6600.. but with AMD they are less efficient than intels now. it used to be the other way around though
AMDs are dual pumped and intels are quad pumped now.. meaning that for every 1Hz intels can do 4 calculations, whereas AMD can only do two. intels used to only do 1 or something like that and thats why AMD used to be better.

with AMD the numbers mean the equivelant intel spec - well their supposed to. so my old cpu -AMD 3800+ was supposed to be an amd equivelant of intels 3.8ghz..

if you have the intel q6600 you have a pretty good chip to start with.
apparently they run really hot though, but the newer q6600's run stupidly cool aparently.. ie 30 - 35c idle on air with above average cooling.. dont know how true that is though.

my heat sink is as big as the hilux radiator! and i let vista control its voltage, so that right now none of the cpu fans are on. this means all i can hear is a very slight hum!

quiet pc's are the best!

[dieselboy]

i had a 486DX once.. i loved taking that apart and putting it back together.. and then removing the heat sink and fan and then booting it up lol

[Albannach]

Amd 100%