How To Get Your Money’s Worth (cont.)

Video Cards

At the heart of your video card is a Graphics Processing Unit, which has its own clock speed. The gist is the same as for the CPU, however, GPUs run at much lower speeds while maintaining a comparably high level of performance. This is because they are created specifically for rendering graphics, as opposed to a CPU which is a general purpose processor made to be able to task a variety of different tasks. The main reason to keep an eye on this number is to make sure you aren’t paying extra for factory overclocking if you don’t want to.

It is very common to see several overclocked variations of the same video card. From a business perspective, it’s a marvelous way to increase your profit margin because there is no extra manufacturing cost. However, I understand that some of you may not know how to overclock or are afraid of damaging the card if you do it yourself, and I can’t blame you. Although those of you that share the aforementioned sentiments may be willing to pay to have the overclocking done for you, an easy way to save a few bucks is to make sure you buy a video card at stock clock speeds.

Shaders are used to render all the fancy effects in modern games. Vertex shaders help with polygon geometry and pixel shaders handle lighting, reflections, and the like. The more shader processors, the better. DirectX 10 cards have introduced a unified shader model that allows a bunch of generic “stream processors” to do anything the older vertex and pixel shaders did, in addition to a whole lot more. The number of stream processors and their respective clock speed are both important figures in the newest video cards and generally directly affect performance.

DirectX 10 has been around for a year and a half or so, but DX9 cards are still very common purchases. You do pay a premium to support the newer technology, as evidenced by DX9 GPUs outperforming similarly-priced DX10 GPUs. Just keep an eye on the minimum requirements for the games you want; DX10 features are a bonus in current games, but the day they become standard is undoubtedly approaching. If your budget is tight and you don’t need or want DX10 capabilities just yet, go for the DX9 card.

Although more video RAM means a heightened ability to handle high resolution textures, it has to make sense in the context of the card. If the GPU is unable to process textures fast enough to effectively utilize the extra RAM, it’s useless. In other words, a GeForce 6200 card with 512MB isn’t going to be much better than one with 128MB. A more noteworthy number concerning video card RAM is its theoretical memory bandwidth. Basically a measurement of how much raw data that can be pushed around per second, it incorporates memory speed and bus width into one handy statistic.

Hard Drives

Storage capacity is the first thing to look for in a hard drive. Disk space is falling in price per gigabyte almost as fast as gas prices per gallon are rising. The highest-capacity drives are initially disproportionately expensive, but even 1TB drives have dropped to about three times the cost of a 300GB one, which can be had for less than $100. Choose a price range and go to town. (Also, know that hard drive manufacturers define a gigabyte as 1000 megabytes, a megabyte as 1000 kilobytes, and so on. This conflicts with the rest of the computer industry that adheres to the power-of-2 rule, which says that a gigabyte is 2^10 or 1024 megabytes . Remember that before you freak out upon seeing your hard drive is “missing” a few GB.)


A hard drive’s RPM rating tells you how fast the disks spin when accessing data. 7200 RPM is the norm and, because the price difference is negligible, there is no reason to get a 5400 RPM drive. 10000+ RPM drives offer small performance gains at a large premium, and because of this, are usually not worth the additional cost per gigabyte.


The cache size on a hard drive is not quite as significant to the buyer. While a larger cache will improve the performance of an HDD like it will a CPU, they simply tend to scale with other specifications like capacity or RPM. As such, manufacturers don’t usually offer varying cache sizes on lower-end, smaller capacity drives. However, the 750GB Seagate drive chosen for the $1000 build seems to be a revision with twice the cache size as older models.

There isn’t much more than a tiny price difference between IDE and SATA, making hard drive interface another unimportant factor in terms of price. Choose whichever you prefer, but keep in mind that newer motherboards natively support very few IDE devices.

Buying OEM hard drives is an easy way to save a few bucks. Like CPUs, an OEM hard drive won’t come with retail accessories, such as cables or backup software. Most decent retail motherboard packages provide ample hard drive cabling for your use.