The Ideal configuration for your PC

You've just bought a PIII-based machine and rush to play your favorite 3D games on it. Alas, you keep getting slaughtered by a monster every five minutes because the game is running too slow despite having such a good processor.

Or, you have 64 MB RAM on your machine and are wondering whether adding more would give you any significant benefits. 

Or, you have a Celeron-based PC and you are wondering whether it would be worthwhile to upgrade it. 

The list of such questions is endless. To help you decide what to do, we did some extensive tests in PCQ Labs using the latest benchmarks. The permutations and combinations are endless, but we have analyzed some of the more common ones.

Factors affecting performance

Before getting into the results of our tests, it would be good to understand the factors that govern a PC's performance. These include both hardware and software issues. On the hardware side, the most critical elements are motherboard, processor, RAM, hard drive, and the display card. Motherboard performance depends on the chipset it's built upon. The chipset also determines what functionality the motherboard will have, such as the type and speed of processor, and the Front Side Bus

(FSB) speed.

The processor market is divided into two, entry level and high-end. At the entry level, you have Intel's Celeron, and AMD's Duron. On the higher end of the spectrum are the Intel PIII, AMD Thunderbird, and the Intel P4.

RAM can affect the performance depending upon the applications you use your PC for. Video editing obviously requires more RAM than word processing. Also, the more the RAM, the more the number of applications you can work with simultaneously.

Parameters in hard drives that affect performance are its spindle speed (measured in rpm), seek time, and interface, or type of hard drive. Drives currently available in the market have a spindle speed of 7,200 rpm. Drives before this spun at a rate of 5,400 rpm. Coming to the interface, there are only two available-IDE and SCSI. IDE is the de facto choice for the desktop and is good enough for most applications. The IDE interface itself has been undergoing technical enhancements. These increase the burst transfer rates of an IDE drive, and the technology is called UltraDMA. The latest in the UltraDMA series is UltraDMA 100, which supports burst transfer rates of up to 100 MB/sec. SCSI on the other hand is used for specialized areas such as servers and video editing, which require very high sustained transfers. 






The other critical hardware component is the display card. This market is also divided into several segments. Many motherboards come with onboard display, which suffice for most everyday requirements. External display cards are available for as low as Rs 1,000 and can also exceed Rs 30,000. A critical element that determines their performance is the VRAM, or the amount of video memory present. This determines the maximum resolution, color depth, and vertical refresh rates that your PC will be able to provide. Commonly available video memory is 16 MB, while you may also find older 8 or 4 MB-based video cards in some places. 





The other factor that affects performance of a graphics card is the 3D features that it supports. These are largely used in games and 3D animation applications. Most cards today have support for at least some 3D features. A good high-end video card will give you smooth graphics and animation even at high resolutions and color depths, without sacrificing on quality. Specialized graphics cards are available for things like heavy CAD work.





On the software side, the operating system is critical. Then, of course, there are the applications that you will run on your PC. For instance, if you run 3D games on a Celeron-based machine with onboard graphics, you're likely to get bad performance. Therefore, you need to choose your configuration based on the applications that you will use most of the time.

Anil Chopra