Holiday Buyers Guide, Part I: CPUs, GPUs, Mobos, and RAM

Closing Thoughts

We decided to skip right past the appetizers and go for the main course, so now you should all have a decent idea of what your options are for putting together any decent computer upgrades this holiday season. We will return shortly with a look at some of the other accessories and various other goodies you might like to find stuffed in your stockings. (Again, feel free to insert whatever politically correct equivalent you desire.) Having just laid the foundations for potential computer upgrades, let's take a step back and look at the bigger picture for a moment.

Depending on what you want to do with your computer, you may find the entry-level options more than sufficient. In terms of CPU processing power, today's entry-level computers are easily able to best just about anything from two years ago. Affordable dual-core processors run circles around Pentium 4 Hyper-Threading chips, and they do so while using less power. If you need more number crunching prowess, now is a great time to upgrade. That said, if you don't require a lot of performance - surfing the Internet and reading email generally doesn't qualify as "heavy multitasking" - even a system that's three or four years old should work fine. A few upgrades in other areas might still be useful, however.

One of the easiest upgrades to make, and one that can have a dramatic impact on overall system responsiveness, is to add more memory. Budget and even midrange computers from several years back might have a paltry 512MB of memory - in some cases even less! Not all motherboards can handle larger memory modules, so some research prior to investing money in more memory may be required, but if you can get your system up to 1GB or 2GB of memory you might quickly discover that there's no need to upgrade anything else. Just make sure purchase the correct type of memory, and in some cases that might not be practical. In other words, we wouldn't recommend purchasing RDRAM or SDRAM, and if you have to get some DDR memory we would see about someone trying to get rid of their old stuff rather than buying new. If you can score 2GB of DDR-400 for $50, an older Pentium 4/D or Athlon 64 system can still run most applications without trouble.

Those interested in running games, not surprisingly, are going to have higher requirements. For modern gaming, we wouldn't think about trying to get by with less than 2GB of RAM. You'll also need a reasonably fast graphics chip, preferably at least a GeForce 7800/7900 or Radeon X1800/X1900 or better. If you don't have something like that already, there's a good chance you're running an older AGP graphics card. If you're hoping to find a faster AGP solution without spending a lot of money, you're probably spinning your wheels; bite the bullet and upgrade to a PCI Express platform. That might mean you need to upgrade your processor and memory as well, but if you've managed to limp along in games so far, the latest titles are ready to put the nail in your AGP coffin.

The last item we've discussed today is sort of odd man out when it comes to upgrading. Generally speaking, we don't usually find ourselves in need of a motherboard upgrade unless we are also planning on changing processors and perhaps memory and/or graphics cards as well. About the only other time you need to buy a new motherboard is if your old one breaks. In that case, compatibility with existing components is probably going to take precedence over new features; otherwise you're back to upgrading everything again.

While we've covered plenty of options, there are more products and technologies coming that will help keep things interesting. In the graphics department, we have the potential for running three or four AMD cards on the appropriate platform. If everything works okay with the drivers, the potential performance increase sounds great. Then again, we all saw how easy it was for NVIDIA to stay on top of Quad-SLI driver support. Speaking of which, NVIDIA also appears to be ready to run more than two cards in SLI. So the multi-CPU wars between AMD and Intel will soon extend to multi-GPU wars for AMD and NVIDIA. As long as compatibility and performance make adding more GPUs a worthwhile proposition, we're willing to give them a chance. Considering we still encounter issues with new games and CrossFire/SLI compatibility, though, we'd like to see more work on that area before marketing starts to sell people on three or four graphics cards.

We also have new chipsets, additional CPUs, and DDR3 price reductions to look forward to… and that's only looking at the four major components for computers. We will have an additional Holiday Buyers' Guide out before the Black Friday sales strike, looking at many of the other components and other techo-accessories. If you have money, rest assured we'll provide ways for you to spend it!