Moore's Law Alive and Well
I just bought, or rather built, a new home computer. My last computer, a Dell, was about 18 months old. I really enjoyed building my own this time, and Newegg.com makes it pretty easy, and there are lots of articles out there to help. As with my old Dell, I bought a processor that was one notch or two below the fastest currently available, which tends to be a sweet spot in price-value. This time, though, I switched from Intel to the AMD dual core ("toledo") at 2.2 Ghz. Basically both my computers are/were fast machines for their times, though since I built this new one myself, I did a few extras, like going with parallel SLI graphics cards and I overclocked the whole rig about 10-15%.
The result? My 18-month-old machine gets a 3dwinmark score of 250. My new machine gets a score of over 13,000, or over 70 times better! Granted, this is on a synthetic benchmark mainly aimed at measuring 3d graphics performance, but this is still a huge leap in performance in 1.5 years. I have also played around with my hard drive selection and configuration to get a jump in performance there as well.
I spent a lot of time researching and picking out my components -- that is the real joy of a self-build, that you know the quality and trade-offs of every single subsystem in the box. If anyone out there is interested, email me and I will tell you the exact components I chose and why, or maybe I will do a post on it sometime.
UPDATE: Components posted here.
