Although AGP isn’t yet a dead technology for graphics cards, it’s rapidly moving on to the endangered list as PCI Express grows in popularity. Motherboards that support PCI Express have a large chunk of data bandwidth assigned to this new bus which is usually divided up into 20 lanes.
Of these 20 lanes, 16 are dedicated [...]
Although still expensive, DVD writers are slowly coming down in price and are finding their way into high-end PCs. But the battle still rages over which format (DVD-R/-RW, DVD+R/+RW or DVD-RAM) is the best. And, for that matter, which one will become the industry standard, which is a different question altogether.
The battle between DVD recording [...]
Once upon a time, you bought a new motherboard purely as a home for your shiny new processor, and although that may still be true for most people, today’s motherboard designs have so many features that it’s possible to keep your old processor and completely upgrade your system just by swapping the motherboard for one [...]
When Intel originally launched the Pentium 4 processor, the market was slow to embrace the new chip. Processor prices were relatively high and the new processor required an entirely new platform. Components all the way down to the power supply had to be replaced.
Compounding the situation was the new processor’s reliance on expensive Rambus memory. [...]
At the time, a Pentium III motherboard running at 350MHz may have seemed all you’d ever need, just like 640KB of memory was once ‘more than enough’. But things have moved on. It’s time to upgrade.
Buying a new motherboard and processor will not only give you the opportunity to improve your overall system speed, but [...]