Cores & Gigahertz

[Paul]

I know there are one or two computer wizards here, I'm hoping you might help me out. I need to replace my Laptop, it's literally falling to pieces. It still works OK but the case has had it (it's held together by Mecanno bolts), the hinges have snapped, the keyboard has failed etc etc etc. 

Trying to compare different machines is a nightmare, especially when it comes to processors. What I need to know is are the number of cores or clock speed more important. Is an core i7 Quad core at 1.6ghz likely to be better than an i5 dual core at 2.2ghz? If i have software which says it needs a 2.0ghz processor will the 1.6 quad be OK? Some sites seem to multiply clock speed by number of cores to get comparison speeds. Is this reasonable?

[grendel]

what are you wanting to do with it, Unless you have some seriously complicated software or want to do high power gaming you probably dont need anything more than a pretty basic machine - even those are pretty quick for internet and email. If you were going to be running games, video editing or CAD software, then you would need a high spec machine. dont get yourself bamboozled into buying a machine you will never use at more than 10% of its full capacity.

my 2008 vista laptop still works just fine for internet and documents (and still runs CAD just about). I do have other machines for other uses though.

[quo vadis]

Dunno

[Guest]

I'd echo some of what Grendel has said.

The power and speed of all new PCs and Notebooks has increased significantly each year, even the cheaper machines.

I'd hazard a guess that for most users the most demanding popular task now  is showing video footage from their cameras or phones, many of which can now offer 1080p 60fps.

That is a severe test of hardware which will frequently stutter on a 5 year old computer, but is usually easily handled with most  new machines.

I renewed my notebook last year with a really cheapo Tesco Acer notebook that cost £175.

It has a "budget" spec:

Celeron N2840 dual core 2.16 ghz, 4gb memory, 500gb hard disk, Windows 8.1 64 bit OS

It runs my 1080p 60fps videos with no stuttering, and beats the pants off my previous much more expensive HP and Compaq notebooks. It also runs quite fast enough with Adobe Lightroom when editing my raw still photo files.

In my opinion, the expensive faster machines are only needed now for processor intensive games and simulations, and with those a dedicated graphics card (or cards)  is the most vital component, which could cost up to £500 on it's own.

 

 

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[Mouldy]

I'm no experrt, but my view would be to by the best machine you can afford.  Whilst something more basic will be adequate to run software today, as 4k video and editing becomes more commonplace and other programmes become more complex, lower spec machines will not be able to cope and rapidly become outdated.

[Guest]

7 hours ago, Mouldy said:

I'm no experrt, but my view would be to by the best machine you can afford.  Whilst something more basic will be adequate to run software today, as 4k video and editing becomes more commonplace and other programmes become more complex, lower spec machines will not be able to cope and rapidly become outdated.

The problem is that hardware has always improved at a much faster rate than software, since software development only starts after hardware has been released.

I used to try to keep up with the "cutting edge" of hardware development, but it's very costly, because new processor architecture is always at a very high premium when first released, to recoup the R&D. It's very depressing to see a very expensive outlay devalued so quickly, dramatically  reducing it's secondhand value.

The old adage of "you get what you pay for" doesn't hold true for computer equipment because of the continual reduction in prices combined with exponential improvements in speed and capacity.

Computers could never be considered as investments, since they are so rapidly devalued by newer machines, often within just a year or two, which is exactly why the manufacturers drip feed us with new enhancements, for maximum continued sales.

By the time that 4K video has more broadcasted content support, even faster PCs will then be available that will make the current fastest ones defunct.

Better to spend about £200 now and upgrade then, than three times as much and still have to upgrade, (IMHO).

My cheapo Acer is even quite a reasonable software development machine, with 64 bit OS, and even a USB 3.0 socket and internal DVD rewriter.

[Mouldy]

27 minutes ago, Strowager said:

The problem is that hardware has always improved at a much faster rate than software, since software development only starts after hardware has been released.

I used to try to keep up with the "cutting edge" of hardware development, but it's very costly, because new processor architecture is always at a very high premium when first released, to recoup the R&D. It's very depressing to see a very expensive outlay devalued so quickly, dramatically  reducing it's secondhand value.

The old adage of "you get what you pay for" doesn't hold true for computer equipment because of the continual reduction in prices combined with exponential improvements in speed and capacity.

Computers could never be considered as investments, since they are so rapidly devalued by newer machines, often within just a year or two, which is exactly why the manufacturers drip feed us with new enhancements, for maximum continued sales.

By the time that 4K video has more broadcasted content support, even faster PCs will then be available that will make the current fastest ones defunct.

Better to spend about £200 now and upgrade then, than three times as much and still have to upgrade, (IMHO).

My cheapo Acer is even quite a reasonable software development machine, with 64 bit OS, and even a USB 3.0 socket and internal DVD rewriter.

4k video is already available as a feature on many digital cameras, so the ability to run memory hungry edit programmes would surely be an advantage.  A faster processor and as much RAM as you can get on the machine would at least give some forms of future proofing.  Obviously you can't keep up with the march of technological progress, but guard against obsolescence of the machine before you even buy it.  I guess it depends on your personal views, as with every other question about any other subject.

[BroadScot]

A friend of mine who worked up at IBM, Greenock, use to say, the computer you buy at mid-day is out of date by the end of the working day !

Iain

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Mouldy said:

4k video is already available as a feature on many digital cameras, so the ability to run memory hungry edit programmes would surely be an advantage.  A faster processor and as much RAM as you can get on the machine would at least give some forms of future proofing.  Obviously you can't keep up with the march of technological progress, but guard against obsolescence of the machine before you even buy it.  I guess it depends on your personal views, as with every other question about any other subject.

Absolutely right Mouldy, it's a personal view and choice.

Your "some form of future proofing" is the crucial factor.    It's still a variable, rather than a finite factor.

No computer purchase is future proof, the choice of item can only possibly extend the period before buying becomes necessary again.

It's a difficult balance of how much to spend compared to how much you can delay the next upgrade.

A machine capable of efficiently editing 4k video now is at the very top end of what's available, especially in notebook form.

https://www.videomaker.com/article/f6/17135-editing-in-4k-minimum-system-requirements

[grendel]

my idea of future proofing is to get a large size desktop case computer, then memory, graphics and even processor can be upgraded in future, as technology advances, just make sure you have a big enough power supply - for laptops just get a cheap one and replace it every few years.

[Guest]

9 minutes ago, grendel said:

my idea of future proofing is to get a large size desktop case computer, then memory, graphics and even processor can be upgraded in future, as technology advances, just make sure you have a big enough power supply - for laptops just get a cheap one and replace it every few years.

Mine too, Grendel, for my desktop machine, as far as possible.

....but they keep changing the damn CPU socket types, and the memory speeds and pinouts, so you end up having to buy a new motherboard as well.

Fast graphics cards have stabilised for a while with PCIe buses for a while now, but that was a moving target too, with AGP, PCI, etc...

My 'old faithful' midi tower case, 500w psu, and 3tb sata drive have seen a few changes....

[Paul]

The low cost "disposable" option is a non starter for several reasons, not least the amount of video processing, audio upscaling and movie making I do, plus the little gaming I have time for which requires decent performance. Even without that I abhor the slow start up times and lag that low end systems suffer from. 

In a perfect world I want a 3.0 ghz octacore processor with 16gb of ram, twin 1tb SSD's, fast 4k graphics with an ultra HD 17" touch screen and 5ghz wifi. Oh yes, and I want all that for £400 of course. 

I do use a cpu benchmarking website to look at the relative comparison of different processors however what effect the environment in which the processor runs has on those results it's impossible to tell. 

 

[grendel]

for the above your most effective option will be a good quality graphics card, which may well cost as much as the rest of the computer.

unless portability is a must, I would be looking at a desktop system for those tasks, as the intense graphics usage will cause any laptop to be running quite warm with a high power usage and consequent shorter battery life. 

with a desktop system you have a better provision for power supply and cooling, and can design your own system, and build on to it over time with uprated components.

if you do go with a laptop, a solid state hard drive will speed it up considerably (you can always connect an external drive for storage) I recently rebuilt an old 2007 model dell laptop with an SSD drive running lubuntu 14.04, and it now boots in about 14 seconds.

these SSD's speed up data retrieval manyfold over old style hard discs - so the latest sata interface with the hard drive is a must (my laptop is only running sata 2 i believe which is 300mb/s as opposed to sata 3 which is 600mb/s).

the SSD drive will speed up the machine by streamlining the data retrieval side.

thenyou need to look at the requirements of the software you are going to use, if you have multiple cores is it going to use them, some software will only use a single core at a time - or just half of the cores, this may help you decide whether to have more slower cores or fewer faster ones. at least you have started out asking the right sort of questions, but these may be better answered on a forum dedicated to the software you will be using.

your network connection is your next concern, you want a gibabit network port, and router, as you dont want your laptop restricted by your data connection, a wired network on a gigabit link is fastest, here I have most of my computers hard wired to the network, with just a few connecting wirelessly as they move around a lot.

[Guest]

2 hours ago, grendel said:

.......for the above your most effective option will be a good quality graphics card, which may well cost as much as the rest of the computer........

Yes indeed.

One of my uses for my fastest desktop PC is Flight Simulator X, which I've always found to be the severest test of any hardware, especially with the high res photo-realistic scenery addons.

I've never owned a PC that could run all the visual settings at 100%, but my current desktop  i5 with 16gb of ram and 1gb DDR3 graphics card runs most visual effects with a comfortable frame rate of above 30fps.

I used to use a medium spec Windows PC as my media player on the lounge 40" TV, but I've since replaced it with a very small and cheapo Minix Android TV box which can smoothly play 1080p 60fps video from my cameras, as well as my library of HD films stored on a 3tb USB 3 drive that I captured from the raw transport streams from freeview terrestrial broadcast channels BBC, ITV1, and Ch4.       I edited out the adverts so a typical 2 hour film is about 4gb, stored in the original un-recoded MP4 HD compression.

My Acer notebook plays those HD TV films very smoothly, even over my local Wifi network from the android TV box server.

The Acer notebook is my most used machine, for everything except Flight Sim X, for which it is considerably slower.

 

[Paul]

Sorry to drag this thread back from the annals (or should that be anals) of forum history but hopefully I might have solved my immediate predicament with the purchase of a spares /  repair machine from the good old US of A. A good job I ordered it before we Brexit tomorrow, as that dear old Mr Cameron says we will not be able to trade overseas afterward. I'm not sure what of the internals work, it's coming as is the norm nowadays without HDD or power cord, which would be useless to me anyway, but does have the processor (an upgrade to my current 2.5ghz i5) and mobo, power board, USB board, speakers, Optical drive, screen, battery of unknown viability, keyboard and most importantly all of the case, in tact and virtually unmarked. I'm quite pleased with the find. V3-771's are quite rare and as such even used parts go for big money. To get a whole machine of bit's (just the plastics) for just under £100 including international postage, import duty etc is a steal.

Ideally I shall be able to drop my HDD into it, fire it up and away we go though that maybe wishful thinking. More likely I will have to transpose my innards into it's case but that's not rocket science. I may then treat it to an SSD for the operating system and use the current HDD for media storage. One big plus of the V3-771 is two HDD ports. 

So a couple more questions. 

If I do indeed need to swap over the internals is it worth changing the processor? I have an i5 3210 at 2.5g and the spares machine has the i5 3230 at 2.6g. Benchmark websites suggest quite a jump in performance, is that realistic? Secondly, if I do a clean install of Windows 8.1 from my media can I get back to Windows 10? I appreciate the W10 free window is coming to a close, but I should have time. Will they stop me downloading it for a second time?

As always thanks for your assistance. Be warned, more silly tech type questions on the way.

[grendel]

my old CAD machine sits there and just keeps going - this is probably because I have 2 spare of everything bar the case, when I got it there were 3 machines, 2 cases went in the skip, but the rest came home(I didnt have the space for all 3 in the cases)