Associate
- Joined
- 13 Aug 2006
- Posts
- 9
Hi Guys,
The PC I have at the minute is fairly old and starting to show its age so I was looking into building a new PC that will allow me to play the latest games etc.
My current PC is:
Athlon 2800+ XP
1gig DDR400
Several IDE hard drives
Geforce 4 Ti 4200
17" TFT
As you can see its all around 3 years old so I need to start totally from scratch. I have been looking round these forums for a while trying to see which is the best way to go and have several questions.
- Processors used to be all about clock speed, it looks like the new Core Duo 2 chips are the way to go and it seems the cheaper 6300 is a bit of a bargain especially when overclocked. But it is only rated at 1.8ghz, I take it that is per core? Does windows make use of two cores all the time? Will programs that dont support dual core be sluggish with just a 1.8ghz? Same with games?
- Are the raptor hard drives worth the extra cash over a normal SATA drive? They are quite a bit more expensive but opinions seem quite mixed about them, are they reliable? I was planning one of these for the OS and games and then a larger standard drive for normal downloads and storage.
The goal posts seem to be moving so quickly with IT hardware at the minute and it has been a while since I have had to buy some hardware so appologies if these questions have been asked a million times, I did try searching but its difficult to find the answers.
Thanks
Bren
The PC I have at the minute is fairly old and starting to show its age so I was looking into building a new PC that will allow me to play the latest games etc.
My current PC is:
Athlon 2800+ XP
1gig DDR400
Several IDE hard drives
Geforce 4 Ti 4200
17" TFT
As you can see its all around 3 years old so I need to start totally from scratch. I have been looking round these forums for a while trying to see which is the best way to go and have several questions.
- Processors used to be all about clock speed, it looks like the new Core Duo 2 chips are the way to go and it seems the cheaper 6300 is a bit of a bargain especially when overclocked. But it is only rated at 1.8ghz, I take it that is per core? Does windows make use of two cores all the time? Will programs that dont support dual core be sluggish with just a 1.8ghz? Same with games?
- Are the raptor hard drives worth the extra cash over a normal SATA drive? They are quite a bit more expensive but opinions seem quite mixed about them, are they reliable? I was planning one of these for the OS and games and then a larger standard drive for normal downloads and storage.
The goal posts seem to be moving so quickly with IT hardware at the minute and it has been a while since I have had to buy some hardware so appologies if these questions have been asked a million times, I did try searching but its difficult to find the answers.
Thanks
Bren