<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  Sony&amp;#039;s MXS10 desktop system is fast, versatile and expensive. But is speed the only criterion? I was in a computer store recently, checking out the new boxes, when I decided to have a little fun. I asked the sales kid whether I should get one of the new 800-MHz G4 iMacs or a kick-butt Sony MX system with a 2.0-GHz Pentium 4 chip. The iMac was $1900 and the Sony was close to $3400 with an LCD monitor. Quite a difference. &amp;quot;What do you want to do with it?&amp;quot; he asks. I tell him basic word processing, e-mail, Web browsing, maybe some digital camera stuff. Nothing serious. &amp;quot;You want the Sony,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s got a faster chip.&amp;quot; Twice the RAM and twice the hard drive space aren&amp;#039;t the Sony&amp;#039;s selling points, apparently. All that matters is that it&amp;#039;s got a faster chip. Ostensibly, he may be right. But for the functions I wanted to perform--still the most common reasons consumers list when asked why they want a computer--the sales kid&amp;#039;s response was misleading. Worse, it was a classic case of speed bigotry in which computers are judged not by the contents of their systems, but by the speed of their CPUs. This is an incredibly limited view on how to choose the right computer system. The dirty &amp;quot;secret&amp;quot; of the computer industry is this: Chip speed doesn&amp;#039;t matter much anymore. Need For Speed But the chip&amp;#039;s clock speed is an easy and quick marketing tool, says Kevin Krewell, a senior analyst for Microprocessor Report, an In-Stat/MDR publication. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s what&amp;#039;s driven the industry up to now.&amp;quot; Think of the CPU as the computer&amp;#039;s brain, which manipulates the data moving around the system. As you know, a CPU is made up of several components that do the computing work, such as calculating the values in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or Adobe Photoshop filters. Other components act like traffic cops and decide which instruction to follow next. Linking all these functions together is the CPU&amp;#039;s clock, measured in millions or billions of cycles per second, called hertz. A 2.4-GHz chip ticks 2.4 billion times a second. The mania for megahertz measuring started when Intel started beating AMD with its Pentium line of CPUs. Krewell says the chip giant adopted as its mantra Moore&amp;#039;s Law--&amp;quot;computer performance doubles every 18 months&amp;quot;--but applied it to chip speed. The company did double its speeds every year and a half or so, but this didn&amp;#039;t always lead to a doubling of performance. Ten years ago, computers shipped with 16-MHz chips. Today, they operate at 2.4 GHz. The chips&amp;#039; internal clocks are 150 times as fast, but computers are not 150 times as powerful. Currently, Intel manufactures the Pentium 4 chip, which will likely hit 3 GHz by the end of this year. Apple Computer uses Motorola&amp;#039;s PowerPC chip, which tops out at 1 GHz. The new Pentium should be three times as fast, right? Wrong. Because of the PowerPC&amp;#039;s architecture, Apple&amp;#039;s chips often match or beat Intel&amp;#039;s chips in benchmark tests. Of course, you want a fast machine, and chip speed does factor into that. But the amount of RAM, the speed of your hard drive, the strength of your video card and the speed of your connection to the Internet all contribute as much if not more to the overall snappiness of your system. RAM RAM is much more important than chip speed for almost everything your computer does. There are few software programs that take advantage of today&amp;#039;s fast chips, Krewell says. Even OS X and Windows XP, the new operating systems from Apple Computer and Microsoft, make little use of the power available to them. For instance, I&amp;#039;m writing this column on Microsoft Word for OS X on an Apple PowerBook with a 400-MHz G3 chip. The technology is Sumerian compared to the latest chips available, and yet a quick view of my processor load shows it about 52 percent idle. That means that half of my CPU&amp;#039;s processing cycles are doing nothing. However, like Windows XP, OS X is a RAM hog. The 128MB of RAM suggested by both companies as the minimum amount needed is inadequate and will cause both systems to slow to a crawl. Once I upped my RAM to 384MB, my system sped up considerably. And since RAM is fairly cheap these days\u2014you can get a 256MB chip for about $50\u2014this is the single best investment you can make to speed up your trusty old computer. Hard Drive The speed of your hard drive is the next choke point on system performance, and it&amp;#039;s a critical component for digital video and audio because writing to or from the disk always takes time. Not only does the speed of the drive affect how fast programs launch and save data, but it also affects the overall speed of the system thanks to a memory-management scheme called &amp;quot;virtual memory.&amp;quot; When the RAM on a computer fills up\u2014this can happen when you have several applications open at once\u2014the system will write chunks of memory not in use to the hard drive in order to free up RAM for other programs. The slower the drive, the slower the virtual memory performance. And the slower your overall system. In laptops, 5400-rpm drives are the norm. In desktop systems, however, 7200 rpm is common and there are even 10,000-rpm drives, although they&amp;#039;re not cheap. (A Fujitsu 73.5GB, 10,000-rpm drive costs $750 on that company&amp;#039;s Web site while an IBM 60GB, 7500-rpm drive costs $151.) Video Card Like RAM, video cards are vital. At its most basic, a video card is a dedicated board with its own chip and RAM\u2014usually called Video RAM or VRAM\u2014which handles all the graphics of a computer, whether it&amp;#039;s drawing text on a white background, playing fast games or handling complex 3D models. These boards take the heavy weight of graphics displays off the CPU&amp;#039;s shoulders, and they&amp;#039;re crucial for games. A fast processor and a skimpy graphics board equal a bad game experience, but the reverse can equal a great gaming experience. Connection Speed Finally, the speed at which you connect to a network can affect how fast your computer &amp;quot;feels.&amp;quot; A 2.2-GHz chip will render Web pages quickly, but what use is that when you&amp;#039;re on a modem that runs at 28.8 kilobits per second and the data is trickling into your machine? Your best bet is to get a cable modem or DSL for your home connection and you&amp;#039;ll see your computer speed up. It&amp;#039;s a real eye-opener, and you&amp;#039;ll realize that chip speed matters little when it comes to Internet functions. Bottom Line Despite all this, chip speed remains central to computer manufacturers&amp;#039; marketing plans. That&amp;#039;s because chip speed is the easiest way to catch your attention: Misinformed consumers figure the faster, the better. The reality is, a computer with at least a 500-MHz chip and 256MB of RAM will meet the needs of a majority of users: e-mail, Web browsing and word processing. Keep that in mind the next time some sales kid tries to convince you to upgrade. &amp;amp;gt;Which Components Matter?TasksCritical components Internet use RAM, connection speed Word processing RAM Digital pictures RAM, processor Digital video RAM, processor, hard drive Digital audio RAM, hard drive 3D graphics RAM, processor Games RAM, video card "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/how-to/a224/1278856/>