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Technology Stocks : IDTI - an IC Play on Growth Markets -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Frank Povoski who wrote (7382)	3/16/1998 8:33:00 AM
From: Harold Engstrom	Respond to of 11555

Just to hammer home Frank's point about those other "Things": Many have pointed out that bus-speed, memory size and response rate, disk drive response, hard-disk response, video card capabilities, etc., all combine to make a complete system. Microprocessors by themselves are no longer the bottleneck. You could by any chip by any of the X86 manufacturers and be happy. Unless you are playing some heavy-duty Quake or something. But, I don't and no business that I know encourages its employees to play Quake during working hours. And the next generation WinChip will be a Quake monster like the PII anyway. A high-end system uses high-end components all the way through and that will add hundreds of dollars to the cost of a PC. Buy Samsung or Siemens RAM, Western Digital drives, Voodoo video card, a slot 1 400MHz PII with 2M on-board cache, etc... But, take the vast majority of systems sold by Compaq, Dell, etc. and you are looking at machines with average components. The microprocessors made by any manufacturer are sufficient and they will pretty much max out the rest of the system. Tom of Tom's Hardware reviews each component and seems to do a good, fair job. But, he is presumeably testing each uP with a pretty good setup without the bottlenecks that are inherent in most systems (just an assumption). I bet that the discrepancies in performance that Tom measures probably flatten out in a Compaq Presario or any other mass-produced box.