Your Opinion, What's the #1 bottleneck systems?

[madmanbmw]

Today's current systems are running very quickly comparted to days of old, yet I often wonder what the number 1 bottleneck is with computers. So what is your opinion? Could it be the ram speed, bus speed, processor, software, harddrive seek times, spin rates, etc. What do you think causes the most lag time in systems today? What technology is in most need of an upgrade? This can be for any system you would like, P4 or athlon and any software 2D, 3D, games, business aps, etc.

Madison
mmcmajor@apex.net

 

[rcf84]

I would say its the Harddisk. Hell serial ATA is coming to slowly. And SCSI3 640 is faster then serial ata anyway

Northwood P4 + i845(brookdale)+ 200mhz DDR-SDRAM + ATi Radeon 2 = Dream Team

 

[Guest]

The ram speeds, they are so behind. By far the worst bottleneck. We need a new kind of ram that isn't just a run off from normal dram.

 

[Guest]

I'd have to say that hard disk speeds are a let down too, at a close second to ram speeds.

 

[HolyGrenade]

Perhaps not part of the system but I would like to nominate internet connetion, i.e. modem, or even xDSL. At work I have a 2MB leased line with a contention of 1:1, it will slaughter any ADSL, SDSL or any DSL.

At home I have a 56k modem. :-( I only get to connect at 44 to 49.333k. :-((
very slow!


<font color=red>"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and dispair!"</font color=red>

 

[Grizely1]

in most systems you buy i have to say graphics card. you buy a P3 1GHZ or whatever from a local retailer and you get a crap TNT1 video card.

---------
I am the first and only one with a 16MB GeForce2 GTS graphics card!

 

[rcf84]

hehe...

An 8mb ATi RAGE PRO (xpert98) can rip a TNT1 16mb AGP.

Well i can play "black & white"!!! and "quake3" on it just fine. But my radeon kicks the $hit out of it. But the xpert98 is a good backup card.

Northwood P4 + i845(brookdale)+ 1gb PC100 SDRAM + SCSI3 640 +ATi Radeon 2 = Dream Team

 

[Negaverse23]

I would say the operating system is today's bottleneck.

=
<font color=green>Are you just lazy or incredibly stupid? -<i>King of the Earth</i></font color=green>

 

[camieabz]

Got to be modems & hard drives.

Oh and the user. lol.

<b>
Heatsinks, fans & whisky...Everythings Cool!
</b>

 

[Guest]

Quote: "Northwood P4 + i845(brookdale)+ 1gb PC100 SDRAM + SCSI3 640 +ATi Radeon 2 = Dream Team "
1Gb PC100 RAM?????? Why?

The keyboard has to be the biggest bottleneck.
HDD is the major contributer in common usage.
It really depends on the task at a given time that will determine what causes a bottleneck.

 

[rcf84]

Windows 2000 loves the RAM. Windows 98 and ME after 256mb there is no real proformace gain. Windows 2000 is based the much more power NT kernal. Not the OLDER win 9x kernal which is a dos shell. If it was win ME or 98 im forced to use 256mb PC800 RDRAM. But Window 2000 loves the resources 1gb PC100 all the way. Besides i can say 256mb sdram is too small.

P4 2.0ghz+i845+1gb pc100+Radeon2= Dream Team =palomino 1.5ghz+256mb pc2100+Magik1+radeon 32mb

 

[Guest]

9 times out of 10 for every operating system and hardware configuration.

PEOPLE!!!!

God Damn not even astonauts can F%$#ing use the damn things properly- They call them THINK PADS cause a certain amount of thinking is involved before use-Maybe the civilian can teach them how to use them when he gets to the space station in a couple of days.

 

[Guest]

As I said in another post, Windows 2000 won't be able to use that extra RAM effectivly, if P4 doesn't have enought Bandwidth.

 

[TheAntipop]

In response to rcf84's post on hard disk speeds; you refer to the speed of the bus on hard disks, yet not one drive can actually send data at even 100MB per second, so what the hell is SCSI gonna do for you? if they improved the data transfer rate, then maybe it might be worth it, but until they do, SCSI is almost worthless for nearly every user.

<A HREF="http://www.512productions.com/lobstermagnet/" target="_new">Hyakugojyuuichi!!</A>

 

[Guest]

Dude forget about all this stuff about computers LOBSTER MAGNET kicks ass!!!!!!!!

 

[BuGaLoU]

And for those who don't know WTF that is go here

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[Raystonn]

Once you reach the amount of memory required to keep you from swapping to the virtual memory paging file all the time, the bottleneck becomes memory bandwidth. PC100 memory is pathetic.

-Raystonn

= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my employer. =

 

[Guest]

PC100 is pathetic. But so is PC133, PC1600, PC2100, RAMBUS, etc, compared to the speed of the actual CPUs. I think the big bottleneck depends on what you're doing.

A big problem on older systems was the L2 cache. Off-die, or if you had none (Original Celeron!), performance would be really bad. Also I think PCI is showing it's age, when you try to use firewire, USB2 or that new scsi-320. Plus on many chipsets, the PS/2, parallel, serial, etc still connect via the ISA bus! Can you believe it!

My system's biggest bottleneck, however, is me, and my complete inability to learn touch typing (50wpm with two fingers!)

~ The First Formally Rehabilitated AMD Lemming ~

 

[JoeHead]

Depends on the situation:

Games: They play prettywell today exvept for antialiasing although devlopers have to design to the GPU. I would say the Graphics card is the bottleneck here. At real resolutions (10x7 and higher) the GPU, even a GF3, is the weak point. We may need a faster bus soon as well as a better memory system on the GPU.

Business: all standard business apts run fine.

Scientific, decoding and the likes is the processor. As far as memory the only CPU able to use faster memory right now is the PIV.

Multiple apps: Memory limits by Win9X. If they happen to be running, not just opened, then the CPU and bus come into play.

I'm not sure when the hard drive is slowing us down except in transfering & opening large files.

<b><A HREF="http://www.seti.tomshardware.com/" target="_new">How fast is your PC</A></b>

 

[mbaha]

56 k modems
mbaha

“Build your own you will love it more”

 

[Ncogneto]

99 times out of 100 the user is the biggest bottlneck of the system.

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Ncogneto on 04/30/01 02:07 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Guest]

As JoeHead suggested above, the only correct answer is "It Depends."

You can design (or find) programs for which pretty much any component of the system could be your bottleneck.


In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.