"specifications" of computing hardware.
When looking at or for the specs, one will find a new list of terms to deal with, if not already up to speed with the components and there functions. On top of that, getting a good match between what the computer is intended for, or required to do in satisfying the user's needs, canned be very confusing.
Everyone uses a computer differently, and for different purposes. In fact using a computer is liken to Bowling in a way for the fact that on a PC one will find 8 ways to get an expected result through any one of those 8 actions. Being a gamer or looking for high performance from the hardware of a new system, there are a few things to consider. Without going into the total theory of all this I will attempt to explain bottlenecks.
When setting up a computer one could use the fastest components on technologies cutting edge then somewhere in the configuration have a bottleneck. Bottlenecks to look out for this day in age are going to be more of a question in the realm of the quantity and not necessarily speed. A good example to look at to show this would be for system memory.
Windows loves memory - look for a system which will accept the largest amount of system memory for the given price range for configuration you're looking at. (i.e. 6 or 8gigs is a range I would look to as minimum.) If the system does not have that much in it, and it is pre-configured from the manufacturer well that's OK. Memory has gotten very cheap and is easy to install - It is very easy to install, for that fact you likely will be able to upgrade memory not fully configured in any off the shelf pre-configured system.
You look at the video hardware, I haven't been keeping up with it, but I believe a gig for video memory is going to display nicely and have good performance.
Next look at the hard drive, there are different types of drives which spin and transfer Data at different speeds using different interfaces. Most desktops and laptops are using SATA technology. I would look for 10,000 RPM, cache, transfer speed. Again a hard drive is easy to replace, so a basic system can be upgraded to perform quite well for an average user.
For a gamer or data cruncher I'm looking for SCSI storage w/ a RAID-5 configuration. If you have the cash, hard drives are available having no moving parts. The storage now is memory that I believe is addressable up to a couple hundred gigs or more. Transferring data reaching far higher rates than a mechanical drive and it's analogue parts.
These SDD drives are very expensive, and can not store anywhere near the capacities we can get with a mechanical drive, that to me seem really cheap. This brings other point that a configuration can be set up with a very fast drive controlling the operating system which doesn't need to be a large, say even capacities of only 60 - 80 gig would serve just fine for all OS operation. Using the older SATA drives for storage capacity would work just fine. One thing to remember is that when a drive reaches half of it's capacity in used space, this is where substantial speed and performance decline noticeably as that bottleneck increases.
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