video cards

  • Thread starter Thread starter irf
  • Start date Start date
Depends on what you use the computer for....be more specific about your
needs and maybe your question will get answered.

Bobby
 
irf said:
what is more important p4 with hyperthreading or a better
video card
Click to expand...

A better video card than what?? What sort do you have now? I have a now out
of date NVidia Gforce4 Ti1440 Ultra something or other. It has 128MB of DRAM
It is blindingly fast compared to the card it replaced. which was a very
basic (now) GForce2. It made a big difference to playing games...but it has
little impact when using MM2, it is not really a deciding factor in whether
or not MM2 can produce a DV-AVI file that is suitable or not for turning
into a DVD

As far as Hyperthreading goes, well no matter what they call it, or how it
is dressed up, If you have one CPU on your motherboard, then only one thread
at a time can be accessed and moved forward one operation (or T State) Many
people will wrongly tell you they now have a great multi-tasking environment
with XP (or whatever OS they now use) But the truth is One CPU = One Task
and when its dealt with the next operation in the list of operations for a
particular thread, it will stop operations on that thread and move onto the
next thread etc etc etc. One very important item with a CPU is how much
onboard RAM it has...the more the better because it saves the relatively
slow (as already mentioned) operation of swapping out data through the
motherboard to your plug in RAM. The less a CPU has to do that the better.

It does not of course finish their either. If you have a slow motherboard
(as most people do who bought a brand name PC) it does not really matter how
good your CPU is......it can only process info when it arrives...it will
process it very quickly, but before you get to see the result of that
processing it has a little journey to make...along the bus on your
motherboard, at a slow speed.

Finally, a friend of mine (We did our basic degree work in Maths and IT
together) who now both reads and presents on I.T. at Uni has been telling me
about the new 64/32bit processor which is selling out before it arrives at
the distributors. Its a direct replacement for the top end AMD? and
significantly outperforms all P4's It plugs into an Athlon (you will have to
check this because I am not certain of what it replaces) socket and
automatically switches mode as it goes. In its 32bit mode, I am told it is
faster than anything else in the 32bit world. In 64bit mode it is
phenomenal!!! Strangely it can not access the full 64bits when thinking
about memory locations, it can only access 42 or 48...when you have a moment
raise 2 to the power of 48...thats how much RAM you can have!!! What a
laugh...any way Advert over.

If you have not given up reading this by now, I hope I have impressed on you
the real need for considering which is the slowest component that makes up a
computer...and that is probably the one to replace first...hint (Dual
Processor motherboards are now very cheap, if you take that route remember
that you must have an identical pair of processors, and it will only benefit
you if the software you use is capable of TRUE multi-tasking)

All the best...........
 
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