Which Computer To Use

GillenFamily wrote on 2/5/2002, 6:39 PM

I am buying a new computer and wondered if you all could give some advise. Should I continue using my old one on VV3 or switch to the new one.

Old- 500 Mhz PIII, 256 ram. Works great- so why switch? 80 Gig hard drive 7200

Or

New- 1.1 Intel Celeron 126 Ram (I would upgrade to 256). Front side bus faster. (whatever that means). 80 Gig hard drive 7200

Thanks in advance.

Comments

wvg wrote on 2/5/2002, 11:54 PM

It really depends on your pain tolerance waiting for a render to finish. For me, I could care less how long a render takes. To my way of thinking the rendering is the final step so it takes as long as it takes. I'm busy doing other things.

A faster PC will only render faster and if your preview is sluggish, move it close to real time preview. It has zero effect on the end result. Like I said, your renders will get done faster.

FSB (front side bus) connects your CPU, the main chip in your computer, to your memory, disk drives, etc.. Think of it as a pathway. Higher numbers are better. A older 100 FSB is like a busy city street, while a 400 FSB is more like a rual Interstate. CPU's are rated by how many times they cycle a second. During each cycle the CPU amoung many other things polls IRQ's to see what device if any is making a request. If any device is, it "interupts" what the CPU is doing when it is polled. For example your keyboard has a high IRQ priority. The FSB can be a bottleneck preventing data from moving from the CPU registers back to memory or out to drives, etc.. How important FSB speed is of course is relveant to what application your using. Applications like video editors put high demands on your CPU, memory and drive, so a PC with a higher FSB should help move things along.