How can 1.4ghz be a fast computer?

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http://www.microcenter.com/single_produ ... sku=489757

Is this thing any good?

If so, please explain to me how.

It does run much faster than the clock speed would suggest, being dual core and 64-bit architecture - its an integrated chip with Radeon 7310 graphics included also. It is a budget system, but my computer has the same processor and runs fine, a little faster than my old PC which had a 3GHz P4 HT. Depends what you want it for - I suspect it would struggle with intensive applications eg video editing, but as a bog standard music/youtube/internets PC with, say, a bit of World Of Warcraft thrown in, it would be fine. Not bad for the money.

Clock speeds haven't meant much for over 10 years...

A simple check on the AMD E1-1200 processor shows just how weak it is... it rates equal to a PentiumD @ 3.2GHz which is unable to handle today's fancy facebook games, let alone other standalone games.

This is a PC for grandma to write emails, Skype chat, and play solitaire on.

Currently using a single core 2ghz Celeron with 1 gig of RAM, and Linux.

Celeron of which era though? The modern Celerons will still wipe the floor with one from 8 years ago...

...and it also depends on what you want to do. Playing movies, ancient arcade/Nintendo emulators and surfing the web don't NEED a lot of CPU power.

The real drawback with AMD CPU's though is that they run hot, and at higher voltages than intel CPU's and as a consequence of that tend to go through battery charges quicker due to the fact that the cooling fans are always spinning.

Its about equal to an 8 year old computer, maybe Pentium D. I have a Dell GX240 and GX260 on the front line still doing single tasks

My point exactly. I 'upgraded' from an 8 year old Dell which I'd upgraded a bit (more RAM, a cheap Nvidia 9500 PCIe card, so that it would play WoW and Football Manager 2011 at half decent settings) which keeled over and died two days before Xmas so figured it would do. I've found it more than adequate for most stuff, but I'm not much of a PC gamer other than emulators, old games, casual games like PvZ/Angry Birds/Zuma etc, so my machine is mostly used for Office tasks, internets, videos, ftp, Gimp, music - it does all those at once without whinging so I'm fairly content. Someone who plays a lot of new games would no doubt be very disappointed and should spend a lot more money.

Crysis 2 on a AMD A6-3400M 1.4GHz



http://youtu.be/foDgv2kADw4



Resident Evil 5 ON 1.4ghz


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0C7Ivgyq9Eg

The A6 is not only a better processor (~3x faster) it also has much faster graphics. A world of difference despite the fact they're both "1.4GHz".

I'll be honest... I haven't run something that slow in YEARS...

Since I make films I have always needed something far more powerful... I just upgraded from a quad core to a BEAST...

8 cores overclocked to 5.12 ghz per core (water cooled) 32 gig of ram and 12 TB of HD space...

^^^ It depents greatly on what video editing software you're using, but it sure can be resource hungry!!

Your next upgrade will be an expensive one - server boards with multiple CPU sockets (2 or 4) with each Xeon or Opteron processor having 8-16+ cores.


On the other hand, if your software supports nVidia CUDA technology, you can get one or more high-end nVidia video cards to do the same kind of work, reducing processing times significantly. Lots of RAM is good... and you might want a solid state disk big enough for one project at a time, so it can do your disk-thrashing intensive stuff way, way faster.


Gad I love hardware.

I hate to be contrary... but ANY professional grade NLE (Non-linear editor) will be a resource hog.

My next upgrade will be when the machine either dies or it can no longer handle the footage we are putting into it (which means sometime after I get a couple black magic 4k cinemacams...

It's from 2006 or 2007.

Even though the CPU clock speed may be slow, what is not mentioned is how long the instruction pipelines are, meaning how many instructions can the CPU execute per clock cycle. --Clock speed really is not an indicator of how 'fast' a CPU actually is, it's just an indicator of what speed the CPU processes a given block of data.

+1

Clock speeds are only relevant within the same brand/design of processor (e.g., Core 2 vs Core 2).

Even then, the numbers are meaningless in understanding how much better one is compared to another.

I always go to Tom's Hardware Guide and look for CPU benchmark tests. They install different CPUs in PCs with as near-identical hardware as possible (depending on CPU interface type) and run a variety of benchmark tests. They list performance in terms of time to execute a set of instructions or technical specs that actually mean something to people. Often you find the processor that costs $200 more might have more impressive tech performance (e.g., MILFLOPS (sp?)) but only gets you 4 seconds faster performance on most tests that were timed. Do you really want to spend an extra $200 for only 4 seconds faster performance?