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Dear James
Thank you very much for your detailed reply.
You seem to be really knowledged, which impresses me very much.
I found it also very interesting to read:
... the highest quality dice come from the centre of the wafer, with achieveable speeds reducing as you move out towards the edges ...
For the other facts I cannot follow very well as it is technical too deep for me.
I hope I don't make you feel dizzy with all my following questions, but in this forum I feel like I can write down all my thoughts which are bugging me. I suggest you just ignore me or answer on what you like, ok ... I'd be very happy for any reply, honestly.
I've read a few times the term 95 Watts for example.
Does that mean (max) under full load ?
And what temperature is linked with 95 Watts ?
If I imagine a lightbulp of 100 W, that's pretty hot.
Try to unscrew it without switching it off or without letting it cooling down first, haha - outch !!
As far as I remember the temperature of my P4 (2.8GHz) 478 use to be quite low with around 35 degrees. It is definately fast enough for daily, basic tasks and for XP ... and might even be good enough for Vista I guess ... if the graphics on board were better (64MB shared memory only).
It must be very difficult to measure a linear load of any CPU.
I presume that the temperature increases linear as well.
The life time of a CPU must be depending on the time of usage and the level of load I guess.
But then again, I am into computer since early 80s and I haven't come across a single CPU which died because of its age. The cycle from one CPU generation to another is too quick to go any deeper into this subject I think.
90 nm was cutting edge a while ago, then 65nm ... soon we're going to change over to 45nm ... oh dear ... what will happen in only 5 years time ? Seems the cycles are getting shorter and shorter.
Getting smaller has certainly some good advatages regarding temperature, reliability and speed.
When Pentium D came out, I thought "OH MAN ! ... that is the future" ... ah ah
Then Core2Duo came and I learned that lower frequency is not equivalent to lower performance.
Conventional CPU technology has become a dead end - what a shocking surprise.
Recently only, the price for Core2Quad has fallen so much that paying the difference to Core2Duo would be well worth spent.
Experience from the past shows that the price continues to fall (like usually) until the CPU disappears suddenly from the market. The king is dead - long live the king.
The idea of multi core is not new, but it appears that the break through only came very recent.
Do you remember motherboards with two single CPU sockets ?
What a great development to put the cores onto one die I think, and to top it all, put the cache next to it as well.
I wished they could stick a basic RAM of, let's say 4GB on the die too. That would be the time for Nano ATX, haha ... I like small
By the way, you know the iPod Nano 8GB ... it is soooo small, why are our Memory modules still so chunkey and more expensive ? Actually I can answer this stupid question by myself. I guess it's the speed, isn't it ?
Abit seems to be one of the very few who have abolished the parallel printer port from motherboards. If I could design a new mainboard, I would get rid of PS/2, EIDE and Floppy interface straight away. USB and SATA is everything we need. The crazy efforts to be downwards compatible through all computer history has cause more pain than good.
Take Intel for example, is it intel(ligent) to keep some of the burden from the old 8600 architecture to our current generation ? I don't even dare to imagine what performance boost we could have had with a brand new, cutting edge, up-to-date architecture.
And do you remember the 640KByte barrier ? Do our PCs still work with this nonsens workaround from the past ... in order to address more memory ? If yes - that'd suck big time.
Back to the present. I'm infected with the PC games virus ... to be more accurate, First Person Shoter.
It happened end of 2006, at a friends place. He played Halo - Combat Evolved online (game is from 2003) ...
My computer is not up to scratch as you can imagine. The OnBoard graphics only allows to play it in 600x800 resolution and with details lowered. Funny is that the smooth gameplay becomes a colour slide show in some situations, like when the Bungee (kind of a plane) comes close to me ... then i hardly can move at all ... specially when I sit in a Tank.
At this point I really wonder what difference a fast CPU makes, playing demanding PC games like Halo - with just the on-board graphics in dependancy of the CPU only - P4 to Core2Duo or Quad.
Could you put a figure to it, of how many percent (round about) a GPU and what percentage a CPU takes over in a common situation of a typical PC game ?
My guess would be that the GPU does the lion work with maybe 80% + of the job while the CPU alone could not cope with it. Not because it's to weak - but because it is optimized for different tasks.
Oh man ... well, please disregard my vomit from above, ok ... I just felt so comfortable letting my phantasie run wild
Anyway ... I'm thinking of getting a Monster PC for the badly needed extra performance.
After researching what components are on the market, I have made my mind up with
Quad core E6600
Abit Fatal1ty F-190HD
OCZ 2x 2GB (one of the very few 2GB per modules)
GeForce 8800 GTS
That should do the trick.
Although I read about very bad problems with this particular mainboard.
forums.hexus.net/showthread.php?t=104534
I feel devastated because mATX is the only choice for me and this board makes such a good all around impression. Do you think Abit will revise it and bring a fixed version on the market soon ? ... I just hope so ... heard about important BIOS update (V1.3) ...
It should be able to use the Q6600 with it, but what about the new stepping ?
It has an optical audio socket ... I'd love to know if I'd be able to connect it to my Sony Mini Disk player. This way I should be able to transfer ATRAC music files to PC. That would make my day because I have about 400 - 500 MiniDisks ... yeah, I know ... missinvestment ... same like with my big DVD collection.
What do you think how sad I was when HD came out. Gosh, what a waste of money, haha
But 1080p really rocks and to tell you the truth ... it was very over due !
Honestly, I was never happy with the TV quality. Specially since Computer were able to run in higher resolutions ... hope that HD (blu-ray) will become standard in the near future.
Aah, I just remember a problem I've read about with this board - the shared memory with the video-on-board. Many have reported problems using 512MB from the RAM, but going down to 256MB helped. I really expect Abit to fix things like that. I mean when the specs say 512 - then I like it to work ... or 50% discount of the price, haha ... but this board has good bang for bucks anyay.
Oh boy, I could go on and on ... to write a whole Argos Catalogue about this, but I better stop before you fall asleep
Until then
Michael
PS: Quad using more power than Duo - even when idle, makes me think that the advantage of 4 cores will hopefully rocket up in the near future as soon as software will make proper use of it (multi-threading). I hope the programers will be able to adapt at all ... I say this cause I heard about many problems writing new code.
@Andaho ... it was very interesting to read about your mom's PC which runs with completely passive cooling. Cool !
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Originally Posted by Clunk
