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 [...]
If one thing pushes you to upgrade your current PC, it is likely to be a new game. Absolutely nothing else stresses a PC quite as much as a modern game running with all the high quality settings turned on. You need a decent processor, plenty of memory and a fair amount of hard drive [...]
In the last few months, the world of graphics cards has seen so many leaps forward that now a 64MB DDR board - which would have been top of the range some six months ago - is considered to be a budget, entry level card. Graphics cards fitted with 128MB of DDR memory are now [...]
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. [...]