The search for speed

It is very common when you get into computers and especially games, to focus on speed, can I run this and that game, etc.? It is an understandable question, but it is not easy to answer. Not in a sentence or in a single book.

To give you an example, I am currently sitting on a computer with an Intel I7 920 CPU, I have 6gb of ram, and an Nvidia 285gtx graphics card. This is combined with 3 x 1TB disks in RAID0 simply for performance reasons. This should be enough, right? Can I play graphics-heavy games at maximum settings?

Actually no I can’t, the reason is that my monitor’s native resolution is 2560×1900 pixels. I know this is a silly example, but it is to illustrate a point. All factors must be taken into account when asking these types of questions.

There are many more factors that matter when building a good computer than mzh and the amount of RAM. Like this setup I have here now, this is my second computer that I have running raid disks, the first one didn’t go as well. 2 of the 3 hard drives failed after a few weeks. It took me a while to understand why, but it turned out that my PSU was poor quality and didn’t deliver enough power evenly to all parts of my computer.

So the units ran for a long time with the wrong power input and consequently broke down relatively quickly. This was so marginal that I could hear a sound difference from my computer’s fans. At the time, I had around 6 USB devices plugged in and powered through the USB ports. If I unplugged all of them, I could hear the computer fans running faster.

Building a computer from parts is a really fun way to learn more about parts in general, but it requires you to be interested enough to research and read about all the factors. Not just the amount of money you can put into your new computer.

Make sure your parts match the other parts and that you have a good power source. A good power supply doesn’t just mean 1200Watts. Mine was 1200 watts, but it was low quality and couldn’t even deliver power.