Tips & Tricks For Hardware Configuration

A well-configured PC by itself offers great
performance. The key

lies in the choice of the components and their arrangement.

* Choice of CPU
My suggestion for a CPU would be one from AMD. I choose AMD for the following
reasons
1. Price-to-performance ratio:
Athlon processors beat the best from
the Intel's equally clocked processors. Besides, they are cheaper than
Intel's. Because they support DDR-RAM, the overall system cost is lower.

2. True FSB speed of 200 MHz: Though Intel
advertises an FSB of 800 MHz, its true FSB is only 200 MHz, which is the same as the latest AMD Athlon XP processors. This is because not all subsystems of a PC can work at 800 MHz.

3. DDR-RAM support:
DDR-RAM allows two data fetches per clock cycle. The newer dual-channel DDR-RAM does four data fetches per clock cycle, which is the same number as RDRAM. RDRAM however has higher latencies. Besides, you cannot upgrade RDRAM easily. If you add another module of RDRAM to an existing one, you will only increase the total latency because RDRAM is serial in nature. Compared to this, because DDR-RAM is parallel in nature, you can easily add additional modules of DDR RAM as and when you have the money, and expect the throughput to multiply. Because RDRAM technology is proprietary and difficult to make, it is expensive. DDR-RAM on the other hand is cheaper because its specification is made by a nonprofit standards
organization. Even Intel seems to moving towards DDRRAM, as many Pentium-4
chipsets now support DDR-RAM.

4. HyperTransport