Specifying a new PC to get what you want.

squad member Gender Nov 18, 2008 959 Location: Essex Reputation: **271.3**

I will explain the workings of a computer in terms that I hope everyone can understand to get rid of the techie speak of PC shops.

Think of your CPU as a Painter with a paint roller. The speed of the painter remains the same but he has different size rollers. So lets put this into measurements that you can visualise. Each MB is equivalent to 1 metre in width of the roller - if that makes sense.

A current entry level Atom processor has 512k of Level 2 Cache on board.
A high end processor such as Intel's i7-980X has 12MB of Level 2 Cache on board.

Now we know that the painter works at a rate of lets say 3GHz or visually he can do 3 movements every second.

SO........

here is the comparison of why some processors are more expensive. This painter is using the Atom processor where he can make 3 movements a second with a roller which is 0.5 metres wide. So he can paint a maximum area of 1.5 square metres.

If he was using the i7-980X, he has a roller which is 12 metres wide so he can now potentially paint 36 square metres per second!! That's an increase of 24 times!!

This is why you must specify the correct processor for your system.

So why does a low end system always have the Hard disk drive always spinning? The processor wants to keep as many 'active' components on it's L2 cache so that it can work efficiently. If you have a low size of Level 2 (L2) Cache, the processor will pass lots of it's data into the system RAM which likes to keep itself as idle as possible and only hold data that it thinks the processor requires. To do this, the 'system', will move lots of data from RAM to the pagefile on the Hard disk drive. It will do this continually on a Celeron/Atom processor powered system.

So we have the painter, who is working at a fixed rate,
We have his Roller - the L2 Cache
His roller tray is the system Ram and
his hard disk is his paint pot.

Hope this helps!! :-)

Cheers
Tim

council squad member Gender Dec 18, 2006 1696 Reputation: **255.7**

huh !

does it matter what color is he using ?

squad member Gender Nov 18, 2008 959 Location: Essex Reputation: **271.3**

Not really unless he is painting different colours!! Forgot to put timings in for cleaning the roller - stupid me!! :idiot: :idiot:

Regular user Gender Mar 12, 2010 102 Reputation: 59

:sos: So if I want to paint my house I call Dell? Confused

he

dunno if youve thought about this but

have you ever taken a woman to choose paint and a roller????

usually takes a week or two to eventualy get right colour, right roller, and then 4 weeks to start and finish??

if men were like this we would never get anythng done lol

andy