I Finally Ordered a “Gamer”..

AMD Athlon™ X2 Dual-Core Processor 6400+ in AM2 package (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

AMD Athlon™ X2 Dual-Core Processor 6400+ in AM2 package (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It is very true that my computer is a high power AMD, 64 bit processor with the maximum of 4 gig of RAM the board supports, running Windows 7 Professional edition, however, it is seven years old, and even an Acer after so many years will show sign of “technical aging”. In a less gentle way, one may call this obsolescence.

Running non demanding applications, like spreadsheets, word processors, web site editors, or non demanding graphic designs, its performance is remarkable, as remarkable as Windows, any version, allows it to be.

However, I have tried to do some video editing with the latest editions of Pinnacle Studio and Avid Studio and I started to hit a lot of snags. The same issues appeared with Corel Painter 12, the latest release. Of course if Windows decided that it had to install and update, the slow pace turned into crawling, and running multiple tasks was totally out of the question. Add to the mix that a lot of applications are not really multi threading, or not even 64 bit architecture, and the situation turns really ugly.

Why would Windows 7, the 64 bit version would have problems on 64 bit processors? The discussion can get very technical, and those who understand the topic don’t need me to answer the question, the others, which is the majority would get bored very fast, and probably will not read it anyway. I will try to make the case in layman terms, to eliminate some of the confusion.

Basically we are talking the famous vapor ware typical for Windows. I would not say the same thing about Intel which is Microsoft’s good brother in popular deceit, however, considering that Apple has run its 64 bit software on 64 bit Intel processors, the same giving Windows trouble, I can’t really do it.

Windows, which unfortunately is the standard these days, is not really up to par yet, and even if it were close, it would have been hard for it to do real multi tasking on a single processor. That is why, the engineers came up for a while with the idea of multiple processors on the same board. Due to the intricacies of such an architecture though, the cost of a multi processor board is quite high, and mostly out of reach for private individuals. Lately, new solutions were found: multi core processor.
Basically, there is one single silicon wafer on with multi processors imprinted on it, or as they are called cores. There are advantages to the new architecture. The multi core, although is not yet up to the performance of a true combination of independent processors, which have to be put on independent boards, is getting better by the day, and in the near future will make the multi processor obsolete, performance wise.

Now, in a 64 bit environment with a large data path, adding a new core to perform independent tasks is a real advantage. Add to this software aware of SMT (simultaneous multi threading) and you get in the twenty first century finally.

In my case, the software that I am using is SMT, it only runs on 64 bit operating system, and on 64 bit processor, however it needs more than one core, more than one processor to be able to function.

So, this is why, I spent a few days looking into buying a new computer to accommodate my needs.

It may sound silly, however if one is looking for a powerful computer, one should be looking for what is called “gamer” or a gaming computer. Usually they are very powerful machines, with 64 bit software, running on 64 bit processor with at least dual cores. It may sound even sillier to think paying over one thousand dollars on a computer to play games, however if you want real graphic power, the price is not out of range.

We think about games as something not really serious, however a very authentic looking game, a perfect football game, is not authentic enough, unless the graphics are very fast, with instantaneous rendering. A few years back, similar powerful computers were very expensive, and were used in mathematical modeling, graphic rendering in graphic applications and movie editing. A 3d, wire frame design could have taken many hours to render the image realistically on those heavy processing computers. Today, any kid may play a football game on an computer, with player looking, and moving, even talking like real life people. After all they are just cartoons…

I had a hell of a time to pick up a machine. The brand names were really expensive, and the name was not worth the hardware. I settled on a Cyberpower computer with AMD quad-core and eight gigs of ram. I could have bought an expensive video graphic processor, however the funds were limited and I had to settle for something that costs only up to six hundred dollars.

Considering the fact that I have plenty of one terabyte hard drives, and the graphic board was also AMD, thus powerful enough, I had to compromise on a top of the line for now. I hope to get one in time, and to also fill up all the memory slots, sixteen gigs, but for now, it will do just fine with what it has.

Of course, to make my life more difficult, they already have eight core processors, but for what I need for now, I will do fine with a four core.

I am sure that I will not wait for ever to have clips rendered after editing, or unpredictable movements of the cursor, the brush, on the canvas, because the single core processor I have and the maximum memory on the board can’t move fast enough… It is ironic though that if we have multi tasking computers today, it was not because the scientific world needed them, but because some geeks at MIT, in the sixties while they were students, wanted to play games on the computers. The games were nothing by today’s standards, but they had to come up with a way to play more than one in the same time on the same computer…

But that is another story.

Meantime, I will come back with details about my new machine, as soon as it arrives.