PC SPEEDS !

Computers come in lot's of different flavors. Colors, design, features, and... Speeds! Computer speed is determined by several factors as there are several 'types' of speed:

1. CPU speed.
2. Hard Disk Drive (HDD) speed
3. RAM speed.
4. Chipset (motherboard) speed.
5. Graphics Card (chipset) speed.

The sum of the above give us the overall computer performance. BUT !... Not all of the above are IMPORTAND to everybody. I'll analyze the importance of each part so in future you'll understand as buyer what you need most out of your PC.

CPU: CPU prices vary from €50 to €500. For everyday use tasks like using office / internet / music & movies playback you'll notice NO DIFFERENCE in performance between the cheapest and the most expensive CPU! Expensive CPUs have more CORES, more CACHE and work with higher FSB (Front side bus speed) which leads to superior performance in tasks like Encoding/Decoding or Rendering ! Especialy in rendering, the difference in processing time is enormous.

Hard Disk Speed: All data of a PC is stored on it's Hard Disk Drive (HDD). That means that when you load windows (startup) or Programs, the data has to be read from HDD. A slow hard disk would take up to a minute more to load windows in comparison to a fast hard drive and the difference in their price is peanuts ! :) Usualy, higher capacity HDD's are faster than their lower capacity counterparts.

RAM Speed: RAM speed is also important in tasks like encoding/decoding/rendering but usualy there's little performance benefit on using VERY expensive RAMs. For instance DDR800 vs DDR667 will not give more than 2~5% performance benefit in all range of applications. Also, heat sinked RAMs don't do your computer TURBO since usualy it's a sort of eye-candy and nothing more. Note, that a system with super fast 1GB-1333MHz RAM using a modern Operating System, is much slower from a system using 4GB of a slower type of RAM (ex. DDR667). More RAM = faster overall performance :)

Chipset (motherboard chipset) speed: That's maybe the most important part – since the chipset of a system is the one that transfers the data across the different modules. For instance, when transfering data from HDD to CPU, or from CPU to RAM etc. A slow chipset will not be able to take benefit of your super fast HDD, RAM, CPU. It will pull their speed down.

Graphics Card (GPU) Speed (GraphicsProcessingUnit): Graphics Cards are dedicated devices to fulfill the gamers demands on Graphics Processing. Playing a game means RAPID drawing of a thousand graphic elements in a single moment ! Explosions, lights, shades, particles, movement physics – all done in a millionth of a second !!! That's where a decent card makes huge performance difference from a 'stock' card. A decent card is somewhere around €200 and an extreme performance card is somewhere around €350. There are much more expensive cards but there of no use if your screen resolution is lower than 1680x1050 (a typical 22”).

A good PC technician will always try to help you in choosing what's best for your needs. A bad PC technician will make you pay twice more for a system that you will never take benefit of. I refer to technicians and NOT to salespersons since technicians do know the facts between the numbers where most salespersons know the sales percentage and air-talk ;)