A couple of questions about building a computer.

[Blackecho]

I am interested in building a new computer. I've already put a 120 gig hard drive, about 736mb or so of ram and a 52x cd burner in my older computer. So of course I am looking for a good motherboard/cpu combo to hook them up too. But this leaves with me quite a few questions.

What does bus speed of the mother board mean?

What is a bus?

Is IDE still used in newer computers and is IDE just a name for the cables or does it have more of a meaning?

Can the motherboard or cpu limit how much ram you can have? For instance if some company creates a new ram card with 1,500mb or ram and I use three of them, will the motherboard allow it?

Can you have more than three hard drives on one system? For instance, lets say that I have the master and slave drive on one IDE cable. Can I put another on an IDE cable with my internal cd-rw? What do I need to configure it as? Can I have more than one master hard drive or do they all need to be slaves?

What is a decent bares bones system gonna cost me? I am looking for really good and fast preformance so I can run Photoshop and Illustarator with out hardly any wait, what should I look for?

Also, what is the cache? Is it of the motherboard or CPU?

Ok thats all at the moment. Thanks for any help that you can contribute. I hope to share this info with others.

 

[RyanOldw83]

AHHHH so many questions! Heres my 2 cents:
1. bus speed - how fast info travels from chip to chip etc on the motherboard.
2. bus - a path the data is transmitted across
3. IDE is here to stay! Integrated Drive Electronics aka Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA) or Enhanced Integrated Drive Electronics Started as a 16bit bus standard made by IBM i believe.
4. There are RAM limitations on Mobos.
5. Yes you can have more than 3 hard drives just not IDE, RAID is a good way to utilize alot of harddrives. 3 harddrives and a cd writer is all 4 of your IDE slots and i think you can only have one master harddrive and the other 2 would be slaves, but each chain has to have a master. Someone will correct me on that im sure, sorry .
6. I got a really nice Barebones system that runs AutoCad flawlessly from www.econopc.com for a really low price and i havent had a single problem. www.tigerdirect.com is good too. You'll need a good video card and alot of Ram with a decent system backing it should be good enough for most programs.
7. Cache is a "little library" that holds information you access frequently so it takes less time to load. Cache comes in many levels and variations.

Hope this helped!