Despite the wide selection and low prices of name-brand PCs, there are good reasons to consider the build-it-yourself route for your next machine. An off-the-shelf system, at any price, is essentially a compromise. It may meet your current computing needs, but if your requirements change and you want to upgrade it later, you may run into problems.
Don't expect your custom PC to save you big bucks over an off-the-shelf purchase. Building your own PC lets you match your system to your needs and your budget, giving you the most for your money. Do you need oodles of hard-drive space for your digital photos or video? Pop in one (or more) ultrahigh-capacity drives. Into high-end audio? Go for the gold with a cutting-edge sound card.
Home-built PCs can be a lot of work, but in the end you'll have a no-compromise system that's yours alone. The downside? You are your own help desk.
For this month's Step-By-Step, we put together a relatively high-end system, utilizing many of the latest components. Our system is just an example of one approach that you can take.
Our purpose here isn't to show you in excruciating detail how to build the system but rather to give you some tips on choosing the parts and pieces and avoiding problems when you put it all together. To read more-detailed PC assembly instructions, see "Build Your Own PC." You will also need to choose your display, a printer, and other components. For suggestions, see our Top 100 charts and read about the Best Buys.
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Having two CPUs (and a motherboard capable of hosting them) is more expensive, so computer engineers came up with another approach: take two CPUs, smash them together onto one chip, and presto! The power of two CPUs, but only one socket on the motherboard. This keeps the price of the motherboards reasonable, and allows for the power of two CPUs (also known as cores) with a cost that is less than two separate chips. This, in a nut shell, is what the term "Dual Core" refers to - two CPUs put together on one chip.
There is one more thing to keep in mind: how a computer knows when to use each core. There is a part of the Windows operating system called the 'scheduler' which tells the CPU what program to be running at any given time. This allows several programs to run at the same time, while the processor switches back and forth between them as needed. When a lot of programs are running, a computer can begin to seem slow, since Windows' scheduler is having to divert the computer's CPU resources in many directions. If a dual-core processor is present, the scheduler suddenly has twice as much CPU resource to work with. This would allow for things like being able to run one core specifically for a game, while using the other core to do "background" things that keep the rest of the system running. Sometimes both cores can even work on the same program (if it is designed to take advantage of more than one core - this is called being "multi-threaded"). However, it is important to note that if you are running a single program and it is not "multi-threaded", you will not see a benefit from more than one CPU or core.
Intel did not increase the speed of their front-side-bus (the connection between the CPU and the motherboard) when they switched to dual-core, meaning that though the processing power doubled, the amount of bandwidth for each core did not. This puts a bit of a strain on the Intel design, and likely prevents it from being as powerful as it could be. To counteract this effect, Intel continues to use faster system memory to keep information supplied to the processor cores. As a side note, the highest-end Intel chip, the Pentium Extreme Edition 955, has a higher front-side-bus speed, as well as having a larger (2MB per core) cache memory and the ability to use Hyperthreading (which all non-Extreme Edition Pentium D processors lack). This makes it a very tempting choice for those wanting to overcome some of the design handicaps of Intel's dual-core solution.
AMD, on the other hand, does not use a front-side-bus in the traditional sense. They use a technology called HyperTransport to communicate with the chipset and system memory, and they have also moved the memory controller from the chipset to the CPU. By having the memory controller directly on the processor, AMD has given their platform a large advantage, especially with the move to dual-core. The latest generation of AMD single-core processors can use single- or dual-channel PC3200 memory, but it is interesting to note that even though dual-channel operation doubles the memory speed, it does not double the actual memory performance for single-core processors. It appears that dual-channel memory just provides significanly more bandwidth than a single processor core can use. However, with dual-core processors all that extra bandwidth can be put to good use, allowing the same technology already present in single-core chips to remain unchanged without causing the same sort of bottleneck Intel suffers from.
Top British retailer and high-spec PC builder, Vadim, has just introduced two new waterblocks to its Blastflow range today - the Siberian Rev2 VGA Block and the Tidal Skulltrail SB Block.