Hi all:

As some of you may know, I have been building my own PCs for a while now. I used to keep abreast of processor developments and knew what was good and what wasn't. Now that it is not obvious what speed the processors are from their name - i.e. Pentium 4 2.0ghz I am at a bit of a loss to advise my friend.

He was thinknig of buying a barebones system. It is never ever going to be a gaming rig and he just needs it for general messing around on the internet etc.

I know that these days, RAM and HD space are eqaully important. However, if possible could someone in the know inform me of current developments in the processor market - it appears that speed increases have slowed down compared to back in the 90s when a new processor was released every month!

Where would a x3200 athlon fit in the broad scheme of things?

Graham

Graham1982:

I know that these days, RAM and HD space are eqaully important. However, if possible could someone in the know inform me of current developments in the processor market - it appears that speed increases have slowed down compared to back in the 90s when a new processor was released every month!

Yes, it has slowed down a lot - physical limits for current semiconductor technologies aren't that far any more and the CPU clock rarely exceeds 3.5 GHz. The current trend is to put more processor cores on the same chip and get the performance increase from multiprocessing. All the current operating systems can benefit from that, somewhat depending on the applications (whether they are built with multiprocessing in mind or not). Current better PC processors have four cores which typically show up as 4 separate processors through the OS. All the high performance CPUs are 64 bit as well and you'll need to choose whether to run a 32 bit or 64 bit OS on them.

Can't comment on your specific example, as I have pretty much given up building the computers myself - but if it is the old style single core Athlon (and not even Athlon X2) it is quite outdated. If you plan on running Windows and would have to buy the license separately for your homebrewn machine, the preinstalled "brand name" PC setups from your local store usually can't be beaten for the final price. Linux servers and such are a different matter...

Hi:

Thanks for that, very helpful.

Graham

PS Yes I have noticed that building your own computer is clearly not a money saver. Saying that, I remember when I was in the last year of secondary school (eleven years ago) and my friend and I were thinking of setting up our own business (as geeky kids often do I guess) repairing and building PCs but even then, because we didn't have enough money to buy multipes of the same part it was still prohibitively expensive.