Buyer Beware: You can't always judge a PC
just by its processor speed.
Intel's release of the newest Pentium 4 chipsets this month
went largely unheralded by most of the computer industry because
on the surface they don't appear to affect system speed all that
much. The latest processors come in the now familiar 2.4 GHz to
3.6 GHz CPU speeds, but not all 2.4 GHz processors (or the
motherboards that operate with them) are alike.
The new boards and processors are not of themselves faster,
but the way that they work together expands on Intel's
hyper-threading technology so that the end user may see a big
improvement in overall operation. Many vendor motherboards
support processors with bus speeds from 400 MHz (Celeron) to the
latest 800 MHz hyper-threading capable CPUs. But this new
hyper-threading technology is really enabled by the combination
of the motherboard and processor settings. The savvy buyer
really gets his monies worth by noting this
point.
"Hyper-threading", as Intel explains it, is the
ability of a PC to execute two threads at the same time creating
a true multi-tasking environment. In layman's terms the PC can
now execute two actions at the exact same time potentially
upgrading the speed of application processing by 60 percent.
Hyper-threading is enabled on processors with bus speeds of
800 MHz from the 2.4 GHz speed and higher.
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