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• WD Caviar WD2500JD 250GB Hard Drive... (5 offers) Online shop Price ServerSupply.com $65.00 Assembly Alliance Electronics $64.00 ALLHDD.COM $80.00 UpgradeBay.com $85.25 CtiStore $110.00 See more products The odds of it happening were good, though it was no foregone conclusion: even with a Serial ATA interface, the 7K250 from Hitachi is currently still the best ATA drive. In just about every test, this hard drive finishes a nose ahead of the competition from Maxtor and Western Digital. It must be mentioned, however, that both of these models have been in service a good deal longer than the Hitachi. Whereas the 7K250 was first available this fall, the 250 GB monsters from Maxtor and WD have been on the market a full six months longer - and these come in attractive external variations to boot. Hitachi's claim to be in the lead as far as seek time is concerned (Hitachi datasheet) is no exaggeration. While the 7K250 is still a long way from the 10,000 rpm of the Western Digital Raptor, it nonetheless slams all of its major competitors. Hitachi scores well whenever the task is to run databases on the order of several hundred gigabytes at high speed, since so far WD has no market-ready model with more than 36 GB. Hitachi also demonstrates what can be done in terms of maximum transfer speed, also called interface performance, using conventional technology and a Serial ATA bridge from Marvel: we clocked 112.7 MB/s - a new best value for ATA drives. This lets Hitachi put paid to the popular notion that a solution of this type would entail performance losses. But enough praise - neither co-competitor was a loser in our comparison test, either. Both Maxtor and Western Digital boast faster minimum transfer rates, for example, which represent the really critical figure for professional audio and video applications: this is namely the data rate that must be achieved for a digital video or multi-track hard disk recording if the entire hard drive is to be used (including the slower, inner clusters). Maxtor and WD share the lead here, as neither the DiamondMax Plus 9 nor the WD2500JD comes in under 31 MB/s. Other professional apps include fileservers and web servers. In this area Hitachi is tops once again, thanks to the UltraStar drive series that has given it plenty of experience and know-how. The WD2500JD is the second fastest in this category - only Maxtor has not optimized the drive in this discipline. That makes sense, too, since it has the MaXLine Plus II in its portfolio for such purposes. Under typical conditions in Windows Office programs, the WD2500JB comes out ahead of the others, followed by Maxtor. The Hitachi takes last place here with a nonetheless fine performance. The tables are turned with the Highend Winstone benchmark, but the differences are minimal. The comparison is like a race between Audi, BMW and Mercedes: the performance level is so high that it's the details that pave the way to victory. Yet unlike with cars, the test results presented here can also be extrapolated to a certain extent to models with smaller capacities.

• Well, so far I've only talked about Intel CPUs. These CPUs are in the majority, but there are also CPUs from Cyrix, IBM and AMD. What about overclocking these? Because Cyrix, IBM, and AMD have always lagged behind Intel and its Pentium CPUs in terms of performance, they have had to release their CPUs at the highest possible specifications. When Intel produces a Pentium silicon chip, they are not as concerned if it can run at 166 or 200 MHz. Because of its design and the high production rate, there will be enough chips which run at both 166 and 200 MHz. Also Intel was the first mainstream CPU manufacturer for PCs that released a CPU with the performance of the P200. There was no rush for Intel to release the P200 any earlier, since there weren't any competitors. Cyrix, IBM and AMD have always been one step behind Intel's latest CPU release and therefore they all have reasons to produce chips which run at the highest possible performance level. They also have to be competitive, resulting in a lower price, which is yet another reason to produce high performance CPUs rather than even cheaper slow ones. This is, in my eyes, the reason why the official clock speeds of Cyrix, IBM and AMD CPUs are fairly close to their maximum clock speed. All these CPUs run very hot, much hotter than Pentiums. It is tough enough to cool the CPU properly at its original clock speed, much less than at overclocked speed. Although there are now new and 'cooler' 6x86 and K5 chips on the horizon, I claim the following: Cyrix, IBM and AMD CPUs are already 'overclocked' at their original clock speeds. The CPU reliability demands of Intel for specifying the original clock speed are much much higher than those of Cyrix, IBM or AMD. Hence, we should even thank Intel for its tough CPU testing procedure because it makes Intel CPUs the easiest chips to overclock available. You already paid a lower price for your AMD, Cyrix, or IBM CPU than you would have for a comparable Pentium, so you shouldn't expect even more performance out of a less expensive chip. This is also the reason why Intel can live quite well with my website - they would still prefer you buy an Intel CPU and overclock it, instead of buying a Cyrix, IBM, or AMD CPU. It's just like tuning engines, there is still a lot of performance to get out of a big Mercedes or BMW engine, but you can't gain performance by tuning the already maxed out engine of a 750er Ninja (Kawasaki ZX-7R)?

• The benefits of the Athlon 64 are such that if you ask well-informed users that question, they're likely to scoff at you. If you want to know the details, we recommend you read one of our most recent processor articles, such as the test of the 3.8 GHz P4-570, which contains benchmark results and thermal loss measurements that paint a fairly clear picture. Here are the facts in brief: Intel has been doing battle against high thermal losses in the latest Pentium 4 Prescott since the beginning of 2004. Even though the parts are already being produced using modern 90nm technology, high leakage currents remain a problem. How well or poorly this can eventually be mastered is reflected in Intel's classification of the P4 in two thermal design types (PRB0 and PRB1). The first specification limits thermal design power to 84 W, whereas the latter is supposed to turn out up to 115 W of power. Only recently did 3.4 GHz P4 PRB0 models appear. While AMD's 130nm processors are no energy-saving marvels, either, they at least offer the "Cool & Quiet" feature. Provided you have the right Windows driver and BIOS support, this allows you to gradually lower the clock speed and the CPU core voltage at low load all the way to 800 MHz, which significantly reduces thermal loss. In terms of performance, AMD processors remain a step ahead of Intel models, despite the fact that AMD has only just now hit 2.6 GHz while Intel churns along at up to 3.8 GHz. This shows once again that clock speed alone isn't everything, and is the main rationale behind the "plus" some AMD processors sport after their names. For years, the label was meant to make it easy to compare Intel models (though AMD has tended to go overboard with the numbers game from time to time.) The AMD processor's integrated memory controller works more efficiently than Intel's conventional architecture. For that reason, the use of DDR400 memory (in dual-channel mode for double the bandwidth) represents no handicap whatsoever in terms of performance, and has the practical advantage that it currently costs less than DDR2-533 RAM. Personal preferences are also a decisive factor in any CPU purchase decision, to be sure. After all, a Mercedes fan isn't likely to switch to BMW overnight. From a technical standpoint, however, AMD has been offering customers more for their money for months now.