Howdy all. I am looking to build a new computer from scratch, and my
experience from my old computer is that compatability is everything.
Yes/no/maybe, some eras were a lot pickier than others and
you may increase odds of success choosing popular mainstream
parts/chipsets and choosing a motherboard whose manufacturer
is good releasing bios updates.
My motherboard was not able to use the other hardware I had put into
the system to its full potential.
That's a bit vague... since you're now talking about a real
system costing real money, I think specifics would help you,
including the intended, most common and most demanding uses
of the new system.
So here's the question. What
matters?
First it can help to determine a budget range, anticipated
life of the system, liklihood you might want to upgrade some
of it later.
With a motheboard, I know it should have a a high processor
speed,
No, not necessarily. Each unique CPU design has a
different IPC, instructions per clock efficiency so speed is
only relevant comparing two CPU very similar- from same
family of CPUs most often. For example a typical Pentium 4
is clocked faster, a higher "processor speed" than a
Core2Duo but you wouldn't want to build with a P4 today
unless you had a unique situation like the CPU was already
in your possession and even then, it would depend on the
system use and total cost whether it was reasonable to put
it to use.
and a high FSB speed, but to use the FSB effectively should the
RAM be running at the same speed as well?
It should be running at the fastest speed the chipset
supports, but beyond a certain point the gain is minimal but
the cost is still climbing, so it has to be seen in context
of budget, what gives you the most gain per $ and whether at
any given break-point, any further gain is worth further
expense. In general, the typical person buys the
value-priced components offered at any time and those are
spec'd in (motherboard manual, for example) documentation.
Are there optical drives
that are more efficient with a certain type of motherboard because of
x, y, z?
Optical drives have speed ratings which are clearly related
to performance maximums, while interface matters little.
There is some deviation in performance below the max figures
cited by manufacturers, but it may not be a primary concern
if you aren't using the optical drive quite a lot- and if
performance does matter you would want to avoid it's use in
that scenario since it is quite a bit slower than acess from
hard drive.
What about Hard drives? I know RAID is in, but....
Without a clear reason to use it, and preferribly experience
doing so (but how do you get experience until you do??), you
are probably better off avoiding raid. If you want best
performance a common solution is one WD Raptor HDD for the
operating system and one larger drive for concurrent access
(based on the jobs you do, put groups of files read
simultaneously on different drives).
(lemme
put it this way), If I plug two RAID capable motherboards to two
identical RAID drives, what is going to make the one motherboard able
to run faster than the other?
Given two current generation motherboards, if you used the
same raid array of drives on both of them, the performance
should be quite similar on both of them- at least the hard
drive performance would be. Whether the drive performance
is the bottleneck in your particular use has everything to
do with what that use is, and to a little lesser extent,
what the rest of the system (CPU, amount of memory, video
card if gaming, etc) is like.
