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"I'm going to build a PC..."

...with my Uncle, hes very good with Computers and knows how to build them and everything but he needs to know what specs I want my PC to have so I was wondering whether you could give me a list of the things I should have on my PC and if you can, give me the average price.

Thanks alot.

EDIT : I haven't a clue about Computers so i'm hoping to learn something from this.

Mav wrote:
> Is it relevant how or what I learn?
>
> What matters here is the truth.

Which is what I'm speaking. It annoys me to see someone go around spreading myths and urban legends.

So it isn't you that knows stuff, it's you parroting stuff you've heard? As for him, well it's time he went back and studied again then. He's the only person out there who has ever argued that Intel have a better architecture than AMD.

Intel know that they are far more inefficient, hence the move to dual core processors. And the continual adding of new instruction sets, to keep AMD back a generation.

See, the P4 was always faster at encoding than the Athlon XP, because the P4 had SSE2 instructions. But Intel wouldn't licence them to AMD for the XP. Intel introduce SSE3 for the Prescott and only then do they licence SSE2 to AMD, who bring it in for the A64. The result is, AMD demolish Intel on SSE2 optimised apps. But Intel managed to keep AMD a generation behind.

Is it relevant how or what I learn?

What matters here is the truth.

Then you don't. He does.

Notorious Biggles wrote:
> Do you actually know anything about CPU design?

Yes, in fact I do. The person who told me the facts for this has a masters degree in electronics, two years of which he spent studying processors.

Do you actually know anything about CPU design? I do, it was part of my degree. The AMD Athlon XP architecture is fantastic. It is low power and the most efficient x86 architecture out there. The Athlon 64 is even better.

For a case study in bad CPU design look at the Prescott. 31 stage pipeline, so it ramps up to high clock speeds. Shame it falls down on the fact that it takes longer to flush the pipe.

It gets even better on the Celeron. Again, long pipeline, but coupled with the severe lack of cache, so you exponentially increase your chances of having to dip back into system memory. The slow FSB doesn't help there either.

There is no fact about them being more unstable. Do yourself a favour and stop clinging to a myth.

Pah. It's a con.

The architecture is fundamentally flawed. They made serious cutbacks which allowed them to produce cheaper products, but at massive cost to reliability. It's unstable. Fact.

I've been running the same AMD machine for almost a year and I've only ever had one crash, and that was the fault of a graphics driver.

Also known as BS.

Unless the hardware is actually faulty, the only things that will cause any computer to crash are software and excessive heat.

There is NO irrefutable mathematical evidence that shows AMD to be less stable than Intel. In fact, my experience, coupled with professional opinion says that AMD make for the better option. Especially the Opterons.

Irrefutable mathematical evidence.