Front Side Bus

[ddvmor]

I'm reasonably happy that this is what I need. I do have one question though, raised by one of my mates who admits that he's a bit out of touch with this stuff:


"Quad doesn’t times it by 4 though – you are getting 4 chips all running at the same speed but the machine is capable of multitasking with them. So if you have Quad 2.4 then you can run 4 applications at 2.4 at once – you cant though run 1 at 9.6 – the fsb (front side bus) controls swapping speed between the chip and the motherboard and each other so that slows it all down – you want as fast a fsb as possible"

So the Front Side BUS is 1066MHz on this bit of kit. What we don't know is whether that's any good by today's standards!

 

[ddvmor]

Sorry - I managed to delete the beginning of my post above - can any of the mods fix it for me? It should have read:

I'm about to fork out for a spanky new PC and before I part with my hard earned cash, I'd be grateful if you guys could take a quick look at the proposed specifications and just make sure I'm not missing anything obvious (I've left out the less relevant stuff from the list):

Specification for this HP M8180

Processor Type Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
Clock-Speed 2.4GHz
Front Side BUS 1066MHz
Cache 8 MB
Operating-System Windows Vista Home Premium
RAM Memory 3072 MB
Hard Disk Capacity 500 Gb
Optical Drive 1 DL DVD-RW with Lightscribe
[...]
Graphics Memory 512 dedicated up to 1280 MB
Graphics Description nVidia GeForce 8600 GT
Sound Card Intel High Definition Audio 7.1
Media Card Reader 15-in-1
No of USB connections 6
No of PCI Slots 1
No. of Firewire Connections 2
[...]

I'm initially going to be editing standard definition video on it, but may upgrade to HD in the next year or so.

I'm reasonably happy that this is what I need. I do have one question though, raised by one of my mates who admits that he's a bit out of touch with this stuff:

Quad doesn’t times it by 4 though – you are getting 4 chips all running at the same speed but the machine is capable of multitasking with them. So if you have Quad 2.4 then you can run 4 applications at 2.4 at once – you cant though run 1 at 9.6 – the fsb (front side bus) controls swapping speed between the chip and the motherboard and each other so that slows it all down – you want as fast a fsb as possible –

So the Front Side BUS is 1066MHz on this bit of kit. What we don't know is whether that's any good by today's standards!

 

[paparazi]

1066mhz FSB CPU's are pretty much up to date but as you know in this game there is always something "just around the corner" and in this case it comes in the shape of Intels new Kentsfield range which has a front side bus of 1333mhz.
This range is recognised/designated with the numbers "50" for instance E6750/E6850 which are both 1333fsb processors.
Don't panic though, the Core2 Quad Q6600 has four cores and is particularly good at multitasking/encoding where as the faster clock speed and fsb of these dual cores will make them quicker for gaming and those programmes that DON'T take advantage of multicores.
Looking at the HP you have chosen my concerns would be:
Does the motherboard fitted support 1333fsb so upgrading in the future is possible.
Does the power supply fitted allow enough ceiling for those future upgrades (typically they are low powered and weak)
Is the tower big enough for all your future needs (again these towers typically use mini ATX motherboards which don't have many upgrade slots and don't offer the best cooling)
And a query! You say it has 3gig? well thats an odd number for a dual channel motherboard (two identical sticks of ram are required for the fastest operation) so three gig is odd.
And another query! what is this 512mb dedicated graphics memory? this inferes onboard graphics? but then spec goes on to state that an Nvidia 8600GT is fitted! sooooo which is it? onboard (poor graphics performance) or seperate dedicated graphics card?
And lastly, If this is a typical HP case does it have extra mounting places for more hard drives? (some don't)

Martin



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Participate and help others.

 

[paparazi]

I should also add that ready built PC's like this rarely come with faster memory types, so you are likely to have something like bog standard PC2 5300 which runs are 667mhz, when ideally you need PC2 8500 which runs at the same speed as your CPU's 1066fsb (which is the ideal) otherwise forget the CPU FSB because your memory will be the bottleneck.
Don't get me wrong, these are ideals but when you are spending a good wedge of money it pays to shop around for the best components within your budget (although that doesn't apply to ready built systems)
Martin

We like members to GIVE and not just TAKE.
Participate and help others.

 

[kmcferrin]

You can get to 3GB of RAM in dual channel mode by having 4 modules, 2x1GB and 2x512MB.

Other than that, Paparazi's concerns are the biggest question.

Regarding your friends comment, the front side bus is the connection between the CPU and everything else in the PC. The northbridge chip (usually just the memory controller, but also the AGP controller in older systems) hangs off of the FSB, and the RAM hangs off of the memory controller. The southbridge chip also hangs off of the FSB, which includes PCI and PCI-E buses, USB connections, SATA, etc. All of these devices share the bandwidth of the FSB. That's why increasing the FSB can provide a significant increase in performance, because the bus will have more bandwidth available and face less congestion.

The biggest consumer of FSB bandwidth is CPU <--> memory communications. If you have two cores on a CPU with a 1066 MHz FSB, then the FSB is going to limit the ability of the CPUs to process at their full potential. If you put four cores on a CPU with a 1066 MHz FSB, then the amount of bandwidth available per core will be half that of a dual core CPU on the same bus. So it really has the potential to be a bottleneck at lower speeds.

That's the big about FSB.

Now about cores, if you have a quad core 2.4 GHz CPU, you have 4 2.4 GHz CPUs sharing the same 1066 MHz FSB. This is not the same as having a single 9.6 GHz CPU. Applications and the operating system have to be multithreaded to take advantage of the additionaly cores (with each core able to run a single thread at a time). So if you're running 4 threads, they can all run simultaneously on a quad core CPU. On a dual core CPU they two of them would run, then they would swap out for the other two so that they could get some CPU time, then those two would swap out for the first two, etc.

But if you are running only one thread at a time, then you'll have 3 CPU cores sitting idle while one works it's butt off. So in that case it would be better to have a dual core 3 GHz CPU than to have a quad core 2.4 GHz CPU.

So which is better? Most people only run one or two programs at a time. If they do multitask then usually there is one application that has the focus that needs processing while the other applications are sitting idle waiting for direction (i.e., running Word and Excel simultaneously and copying from one to the other). Having dual cores can provide a big boost in responsiveness these days, because modern operating systems are multithreaded. Going to quad cores provides less of a benefit because most people simply don't run that many compute-intensive threads at once, although more and more applications (especially games) are beginning to be written to take advantage of multiple CPU cores.

So there it is, in a nutshell.

 

[paparazi]

kmcferrin you might be right on the dual channel comment but it's something that needs to be asked as many mini ATX motherboards (if that is what it has) only have two memory slots, it just seems an odd amount for a generic pre-built HP system (perhaps 1X 1gig and 1X 2gig stick, which wouldn't be dual channel) the question needs asking.
Martin

We like members to GIVE and not just TAKE.
Participate and help others.

 

[kmcferrin]

Tracking the exact model down can be difficult because they have slightly different model numbers based on whether it's a direct from HP buy or something available via retail stores. However, I was able to track down HP's Intel-based 8100 series PCs that support quad core, and the mainboard that they're using for that line is linked below. It's not a 100% guarantee that this is the board in his M8180, but the odds are good.

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c01077641&lc=en&cc=us&dlc=en&product=3464173

It looks like it does support 1333 MHz FSB and has 4 memory slots.

I suspect that the reason that they ship it with 3GB is because they wanted it to be more than 2GB, but if they shipped it with 4GB installed then they'd be swamped with people calling complaining that Windows didn't report the full 4GB (because of the 32-bit Windows memory limits).