Processor Speed Definition

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magouster, that's why I asked about the differences. I was told that the difference is great. Do you disagree? I am not paying for boot speed, but overall speed. I don't want to wait for my applications to open and close, or switching between applications. A 5 second difference would add up to a lot of time per day considering that I am opening and closing applications often. In other words, I want to access all my data very fast.
Maybe 15000 is too much, but given the developments, I have to get at least an SAS interface, because that's the future of hard drives. Does it need special equipment too? And if so, what? A special motherboard?
 
You would need either a server motherboard with an SCSI controller built in, but then you would be forced to get a server CPU as well, which would not be good for speed. Your only other option would be to get an add-in SCSI controller, such as this one:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816118027

Notice the price.

SCSI is meant to be used in high-end web servers that handle HUGE ammounts of bandwidth. Of course you COULD do it, but the cost would be outrageous. You could get a standard PCI scsi controller, but then it would be limited to 133mb/s, the speed of the PCI bus, where as the 10k SATA drives are 150mb/s and I believe they are also working on 300mb/s.
 
All I can is [snipped]! If it was about $50, then I could go with it, but this thing is more expensive than top Conroe. Really sucks. So just as I originally thought, it is not worth getting anything beyond 7200. I couldn't find any on newegg, but are there 10,000 RPM HD's with conventional interfaces? I would think that not because the traditional interfaces have built in limitations already.
In this case, if I am looking for speed, what should I look for among 7200 RPM HD's? I guess I could check out the times, but the differences are usually a few milliseconds and prices are too different so I'd think that none of it would make a difference. What kind of HD would you buy if you were buying one to build a PC with Conroe? I don't care about too much space b/c I already have 2 external HD's.
 
As for CPU, 20% is not impressive. Keep in mind that every 18 months CPUs DOUBLE in speed. That's 100% for you. So a 20% improvement is something you'd get every ~ 4 months.

i am sure moore's law refers to transistor count not performance or frequency.

SCSI isn't exactly the future (i assume that is what you meant when you said "SAS") :p i'm pretty sure it predates IDE, it is just an alternate interface with different uses. a 10k rpm is a worthwhile investment if you would like to squeeze a little more performance out of your pc when it comes to load times.
 
In that case newegg's "Item Intelligence" must be misguided. For HD it clearly says that the future is SAS and SCSI and if one wants to have a compatible system with the coming technology then SAS/SCSI is the way to go.
 
i am sure moore's law refers to transistor count not performance or frequency.
You are correct, and infact Moore's Law has proven inconsistent as the number of transistors have more than doubled across an 18 month timespan...although to be fair the number of transistors does determine the complexity of the microprocessors

If you are interested in drive seek time perhaps you should consider a multidrive RAID0 span with at least 4 drives, although of course this would be rather unreliable and expensive...a Raptor is really the best option for hard drive speed concerns

You have to consider that a processor such as a 2.6GHz Core 2 Duo has a significant number of more FLOPs per cycle compared to previous cores. I don't have numbers for the Prescott, but considering K8 Athlon64s perform roughly 2 FLOPs per cycle and they are generally significantly faster than the Prescott, you can surely consider how fast the Conroe will be as it performs roughly 4 FLOPs per cycle...you also have to consider than a Core 2 Duo is going to be a multicore processor compared to your singlecore Prescott
 
I had found out about the processor speed doubling from Hawking's great book "A brief history of time." Yes, maybe CPU's with double the speed don't reach the market as often due to testing, marketing gimmicks, and bureaucracy, but the important aspect is that regardless of all those apparent hindrances, the intrinsic power of computers does double every 18 months. This makes one think where are the humans headed with so many couch potatoes and yes, even hardcore gamer (sorry, but I donÂ’t see the point of playing a PC game besides that it is fun).

IÂ’ll just stick with the raptor. Actually when you look at the timings you can see that the speed doubles from 7200RPM to 10000RPM, but from 10K to 15K the difference isnÂ’t that much.

Thanks for the processor info. It gives a nice, quantified insight.
 
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