Brake frequency

[Leroy Riggs]

Wiz, when one buys a computer, they will tell you the computer is capable of, perhaps, 2.2 Ghz. This isn't real and is what I call artificial 'brake frequency' after the 'brake horsepower' in cars.

What is the first one or two things in a computer that limits the speed? HD access perhaps?

[Dave Potter]

they will tell you the computer is capable of, perhaps, 2.2 Ghz. This isn't real and is what I call artificial 'brake frequency' after the 'brake horsepower' in cars.

I'm not "Wiz", but, why isn't it "real"? If the cpu is a 2.2ghz cpu, and they say it is, that's about as "real" as you're gonna' get. The cpu is going to operate at 2.2 Ghz, unless you make changes to its settings.

What is the first one or two things in a computer that limits the speed? HD access perhaps?

Throughput depends on everything in the system working together. There aren't one or two things that are the primary limiting factors. Bottlenecks that can occur will be dependent on the kind of application you try to run. Different kinds of applications pose very different kinds of demands on a PC system.

[Wiz Feinberg]

Wiz, when one buys a computer, they will tell you the computer is capable of, perhaps, 2.2 Ghz. This isn't real and is what I call artificial 'brake frequency' after the 'brake horsepower' in cars.

What is the first one or two things in a computer that limits the speed? HD access perhaps?

The speed factor you referred to is the clock frequency of the CPU (Central Processing Unit). A CPU that has a "Front Side Bus" frequency of 200 Mhz, and which has an internal, or electronically set multiplier of 11X, will have an equivilant clock frequency of 2200 Mhz (Mhz = Million hertz: a.k.a. Cycles Per Second). This represents the speed at which it processes instructions.

The instructions that the CPU processes are sent to it from several places, some of which include recent instructions/data that are temporarily stored in it's own internal Level 1, or Level 2 onboard cache, which clocks at the same speed as the processor, or data sent from the system RAM, which clocks either at the same rate, or a different rate, depending on settings and materials used in the RAM modules, or the data may be sent from the hard drive, which is much slower at reading and writing information to or from the CPU.

Mixed into this potpourri are instructions sent by software to the CPU. Software resides on your hard drive, or on a CD, or a thumb drive, or other type of media and will run slower than your processor, causing a slowdown. That is why most software is designed to read it's current operations into RAM, where the CPU can access it at extremely high speeds. However, the operating system itself must also exist in RAM, as well as background processes and security programs. If your computer is lacking a sufficient amount of RAM to hold all this data until thye CPU calls for it, the "oldest" data will be shipped out to your hard drive, to what is known as a "PageFile." When that paged out data is needed again the CPU will search for it at the assigned location where it was last reported to reside, on your hard drive and will read it back into RAM, removing the next oldest data to make room for it. That is your other bottleneck and slowdown; insufficient, and/or inefficient RAM.

I won't go into any further details aside from recommending that you read the material on my web page all about RAM.

I hope this helps explain the causes of slowdowns in new computers.

Other things can also contribute to slowdowns, like badly written, or bloated programs, spyware, viruses, key-loggers or database driven programs.

[Leroy Riggs]

OK, thanks. I don't really have a problem except I would prefer this Dell needs torun at quantum computer speeds.

I just wanted this info for general knowledge--I'll look at your RAM page Wiz.