What specs make a computer faster?

Question

If I were in the market to buy a new PC (not do things to speed up a computer I already have) what specs should I pay attention to when shopping? Is it front-side bus speed? What about cache size? Other factors I am curious about include: (obviously) processor speed, hard drive cache, & hard drive speed (RPM). Thanks!

Answer 1

OK, (1) Psu =650watts (2) Motherboard with support for quad core cpu, ddr2/3 and pci-e 2 (3) The best graphics card that you can afford, the Ati 4750/70 are both affordable and future proof (4) Good quality memory, (I prefer "Corsair") x 2gb/8gb depending on operating system being 32/64bit flavour (5) The fastest quad core pentium cpu that you can afford (6) Hard drive specs:- 1tb Seagate 7200rpm (anything faster is overkill) unless you want a "raid array" which requires multiple drives and will be faster (7) A spacious casing with plenty of fans, the bigger the better. Overclocking your components will increase the speed of your rig but may need water cooling which can be expensive. Speed comes at a premium. We can overclock components at no extra finacial cost but a reduced hardware life span or spend thousands of £/$ for a super fast system that cost the earth to run. I love questions like this, The phrase "Poetic license" springs to mind. I wish you good luck whichever road you choose

Answer 2

for the average person, you will never notice any difference between different cache sizes or different front-side bus speeds. Those are pretty much for benchmarking and record-breaking purposes only.



Depending on your uses,

for any sort of computer intensive editing like sound or video editing, make sure you get a quad core. Intel Core 2 Quad is the best choice.

anything faster than a 2.4ghz Q6600 is great. 2.4ghz is super fast for the average person already, but editing takes alot of power.



If you access data alot or store and retrieve things that need speed, pay attention to harddrive speed. Not many people will notice this, but the average harddrive spinning speed of the needle is 5400 RPM to 7200 RPM. For the speed editing needs, get a 10,000 RPM harddrive. Examples of those are Western Digital Raptor or Velociraptor series harddrives or Seagate Cheetah series drives.



IF you game like CoD4 and Half Life 2, go for a dual core that is around 3ghz. Again, only go for Intel Core 2 Duo.

speed is all you need in gaming.



for RAM wise, go with 4gb. You'll need it in the future.



Video card, go for atleast an 8000 series Gforce graphics card.

No lower than a 8800 GTS 320mb.



8800 GTS 640mb is good

8800 GT

8800 GT 1gb

8800 GTX

9600 GT is ok

9600 GS is NO GO <- DO NOT GET if you even can

9800 GT is good

9800 GTX is great

9800 GX2 is amazing

GTX 260 is freakin cool

GTX 280 is over kill



if you go ATI / Radeon

4850

4870

4870 x2

pretty much 4000 series card.

i'm not an expert on ATI cards.



Operating system.

Windows XP 64 bit

or Windows Vista Ultimate 64 bit

make sure it is Ultimate. and get NOTHING ELSE other than Ultimate.

Answer 3

Specs to make a computer faster....

You have to pay attention to all specs for reason that.



Graphic card can have high Clock/Shader/Memory speed with Low Stream Processing Units.. Or vice versa



Therefore you have to look at all the specs that are listed in the product.

Answer 4

other than those 3, a video card if you play a lot of games, Usually when you buy a so called custom computer the just take from one area of the computer and put in another for example 1gb 1066mhz ram with 250gb 5400rpm ata133 16mb versus 2gb 667mhz ram and 200gb 7200rpm 16mb sata etc...



also know what your using the computer for, the guy below me would have you buy $5000 machine when you could easily get the job done with a $500 sulotion

Answer 5

Using a registry cleaner can clean up your computer and then make your computer faster,Why?the reason is that there may be some registry errors and remnant,corrupt files and temp files in your computer to cause "computer slow".

Every time you install and uninstall software on your computer and surfing online you create junk in the computer registry.over time, the registry can grow to enormous proportions, especially if the various programs you've installed do not do a good job of deleting and/or updating it's Registry entries.You need to scan and clean your computer with registry cleaner to make it fast.Good Registry Cleaner will improve your computer and Internet performance dramatically!

There are some comparison and review of TOP 5 registry cleaners.

http://www.make-computer-faster.com/

You can download and scan your computer for free.