which processor?

[t.man]

actually which is the best to buy between intel centrino and AMD athlon?

 

[blueroomelectronics]

There are hundreds of different models of both, which ones are you interested in?

 

[t.man]

There are hundreds of different models of both, which ones are you interested in?

AMD athlon dual core at the speed of 2.0Ghz and 4G ram
centrino dual core at the speed of 2.0Ghz and 2G ram

both at the same price. does that mean intel one is better?

 

[Sceadwian]

Systems speeds nowdays are nearly useless to judge which is better, bus and memory speed are a bigger limiting factor, as well as additional supported technologies.
It's more than I even care to keep track of. You can't pick a processor one vs another, you have to look at the entire system as a whole.

 

[Hero999]

What graphics card, motherboard and hard drive do the systems have?

What spec' PC do you currently have?

You might find upgrading the hard drive and memory will be enough.

Hard drive speed is important to load the OS and applications quickly - I noticed a large speed increase going from an IDE 5400rpm drive to a 7200rpm drive. I hope it'll get even faster when I upgrade to a SATA 10,000rpm drive.

I think you should consider upgrading your current PC rather than buying a new one unless it's really old.

 

[Sceadwian]

You missed the really important one Hero. System bus speed. It is the single most important speed limiting factor on any machine, after all, EVERY single last bit of data that goes from a harddrive to memory to a video card or to whatever other devices are involved ALL go through the system bus of the motherboard. Slow system bus, slow machine no matter how many high octane peripherals you plug in.

I tried to explain this to my brother in law, who bought a new machine from a big box store 2 years ago with better specs than my 5 year old machine. His machine became unusable before mine and he paid more and had stupid problems along the way.

 

[Hero999]

You're right, although it only makes a difference to things like games and 3D CAD, in my experience the hard drive seek time seems to be the smallest bottleneck. If you click on a program and it takes awhile to load, it's because it takes awhile to find the information on the hard disk, if you're using a crappy IDE drive like I do you'll notice it.

In fact the biggest speed increase I've notices is when I went from 5400rpm hard drive to a 7200rpm, both IDE, hopefully when I get the 10,000rpm SATA Raptor, things will get a bit faster.

 

[Sceadwian]

You're right, although it only makes a difference to things like games and 3D CAD

Absolutely not the case. With the system bus as a bottleneck even modest 2D video playback can bog the system down let alone 3D. If you're doing anything that uses the system bus heavily it will saturate so fast your head will spin, and once that happens you have every device on your computer fighting for bus time like prize fighters, problem is no one wins. On generic or cheaper machines I think you're right though HD would be the next best bet for system improvement. I'm looking at a hard disk upgrade next because my vid card is fine for my needs, the system itself is stellar except memory which I don't need to stress out too much anyways. I'm starting to weigh my systems drive needs and figuring out what a good solution for me is. I'll spend about a week looking at benchmarks =)

 

[Hero999]

I don't think I've ever had that problem myself.

For me it's always been not having enough memory and disk paging. Now with 1GB that's not normally a problem and when I go up to 4GB it never will be a problem.

The seek time on a 7200rpm hard drive is 9ms: how much data can be transferred through the system bus in that time? When you load a program or boot the OS, it's always the hard drive you're waiting for, the system bus, RAM, processor speed hardly matter unless your motherboard is really old.

 

[Sceadwian]

Sorry Hero, I have to disagree, I've seen more serious bottlenecks with the system bus, especially with games. You may simply have never used a machine that's had such a low speed bus. For simple applications you'll never see it, it doesn't show up till the system is taxed, and it's becoming less of a problem because system bus speeds jumped a lot in the last few years.

 

[t.man]

Hi,
I've got Acer 4930 that has a Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T6400 and is running a 32-bit Vista at 4GB RAM. and I now want to migrate to windows 7.
I need to know if the 64bit version is compatible and would work ok?. or should i use the 32bit version of windows 7?
Any help would be great.

 

[Sceadwian]

Why do you want to migrate to windows 7? And what do you mean migrate? A new machine will cost only a couple times more than the retail purchase price of Windows 7. It's a 64 bit processor like all are today so there's no reason you wouldn't go for 64 bit from the start. It sounds like you're trying to over analyze your system and determine if you want to spend money on an OS that you might not need.

From the start you need to throw out all the terminology hardware and babble from the start and answer basic questions.

Does the system you have do what you want it to do? If not, then what is it that you want to do? Can you add this/these features to your current machine? If not why?

I've found the bulk majority of people that activly use the internet still need nothing more sophisticated than windows98... Your case is however unique so I won't say that. Without knowing your needs your question has no meaning or answer.

 

[Hero999]

Sorry Hero, I have to disagree, I've seen more serious bottlenecks with the system bus, especially with games. You may simply have never used a machine that's had such a low speed bus. For simple applications you'll never see it, it doesn't show up till the system is taxed, and it's becoming less of a problem because system bus speeds jumped a lot in the last few years.

I don't play games which is why I probably never notice the bus speed.

What I do notice is the amount of time it takes for my system to load a program or the operating system the hard drive.

I suppose we will disarrange because we use our computers for different things.

Hi,
I've got Acer 4930 that has a Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T6400 and is running a 32-bit Vista at 4GB RAM. and I now want to migrate to windows 7.
I need to know if the 64bit version is compatible and would work ok?. or should i use the 32bit version of windows 7?
Any help would be great.

You don't need to buy a new PC, just a new operating system.

So why not just buy a copy of Windows 7?

Your machine exceeds the minimum system requirements and is more than adequate.
Windows 7 system requirements - Microsoft Windows

I'd just dump Vista and go to XP professional, it's probably better than the crappy home edition of Vista. If you want to go with Windows 7 then I would think it's best to get one of the beter versions as opposed to the simple one. To be honest I've never used either Vista or Windows 7 so I'm probably not the best person to ask.
**broken link removed**

EDIT:
If you're going to buy a new PC, I'll have your old one, it's better than mine.

 

[Sceadwian]

Yes, in your case unless you're doing massive multitasking or seriously processor intensive applications you wouldn't even notice the speed limitations of the bus, but you would with the hard drive. Both the hard drive and the general system on my machine are pretty decent, it's not a gaming rig but it's got some oomf under the hood.

So why not just buy a copy of Windows 7?

It's almost cheaper to buy a new computer than it is to buy the full retail version of Windows 7.

t.man You have plenty of machine why do you want to change operating systems? Vista will be supported for at least the next 4 or 5 years and by the time it's no longer useful there will be a new Windows version out. If you have a 64 bit processor you get a 64 bit os it's that simple. I would NOT recommend spending any money on upgrading, it will provide you no net benfit aside from a slightly flashy cover change. The basic core of the OS is still essentially the same. The biggest thing they added was OS support for multi-touch, which the devices aren't commonly available yet.

 

[Hero999]

It's almost cheaper to buy a new computer than it is to buy the full retail version of Windows 7.

What about a Vista to Windows 7 upgrade? Surely that's cheaper?

 

[Sceadwian]

The home premium upgrade is 120 dollars.
The "Ultimate Upgrade" is 220.
"Professional" is 200.

The basic version should not be considered for purchase by ANY user, and is generally only availabe on netbooks.

 

[Hero999]

I found somewhere a bit cheaper.
**broken link removed**

It does seem much better than buying a new PC.

I'd never buy a new PC just or a new OS unless it's because my current PC won't run the current version of Windows which I need to upgrade to to run a certain piece of software. Fortunately this has never happened to me and it certainly won't happen in the future as I'm moving towards Linux and open source software.

 

[Boncuk]

I recently purchased a new mainboard equipped with an Intel duo-core 2.8GHz CPU and 4GB of dual channel DDR-RAM at a bus speed of 667MHz.

All the peripherals remained the same with the exception of the graphic acellerator and 64bit sound card - because of space problems (The board has just two PCI-slots.) I'm using the onboard devices now.

The Windows system (XP-home edition) loads at about double speed compared with single channel RAMs and a duo-core 2.2GHz CPU I used before.

Other than SCSI devices all external memory is managed by the CPU which of course means some kind of bottle neck, but SATA-HDDs have a shorter seek times than IDE-drives and a data transfer rate of minimum 15GB/s.

If a program is used frequently the ahead looking windows feature takes care of priority.

Even the longest program loads within a split of a second.

Boncuk

 

[Hero999]

SATA-HDDs have a shorter seek times than IDE-drives and a data transfer rate of minimum 15GB/s.

15 Giga bits per second or 15 Giga bytes per second?

Are you sure?

The last time I checked, most hard drives do 300MB/s at most, even if the cable can go faster.

I've found upgrading the hard drive alone gives a significant performance boost, I noticed it when going from an old 5400RPM to a new 7200RPM drive, the performance boost was more than going from 256MB RAM to 512MB.

 

[Boncuk]

15 Giga bits per second or 15 Giga bytes per second?

Are you sure?

The last time I checked, most hard drives do 300MB/s at most, even if the cable can go faster.

I've found upgrading the hard drive alone gives a significant performance boost, I noticed it when going from an old 5400RPM to a new 7200RPM drive, the performance boost was more than going from 256MB RAM to 512MB.

Hi Hero,

I was in a slight error about the data transfer rate and checked out some test reports yesterday.

The SAMSUNG F1 (SATA - 1,024GB) seems to be the fastest at the moment. Its data transfer rate was measured 90 - 100MB/s. That one has a cache of 48MB, while many HDD manufacturers just provide 16 to 32MB, the worst 8MB.

Other HDDs with lower capacity (256/512GB) have a data transfer rate of about the same, but personally I wouldn't bother buying one of those because software becomes memory hungry more and more.

Copying DVD movies to an HDD it will be full very quickly.

Till now I have 1.5TB of disc space (distributed over four HDDs) and each drive is full up to 70%

Thinking about the average price for HDDs of 7Cents per MB I guess the descision buying a high capacity disk drive is easy.

Regards

Hans