Top 20 display cards as of end-July 2010

The top 20 high end PCI-E 16X display cards in PassMark Video Card Benchmarks as of today 29 July 2010 is as follow:

I got the estimated price as of today from the HardwareZone Price Guides.

From here, we can see that those top performance display cards are all priced above RM500.

Something very interesting I noticed in Malaysia Dell Online Store is that, there are 4 options of display card available for the Dell Studio XPS 8100 desktop PC: NVIDIA GeForce GT 220 (default), NVIDIA GeForce GTS 240 (add RM205), NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 (add RM409) and ATI Radeon HD 5770 (add RM34).

This mean that you can actually get the high end ATI Radeon HD 5770 (ranked #20 in the benchmark above) at a minimal upgrade cost.

And here is the estimated reference price for the 4 cards based on the HardwareZone Price Guides:

• GeForce GT 220: RM280
• GeForce GTS 240: RM400 (+RM120)
• GeForce GTX 260: RM580 (+RM300)
• Radeon HD 5770: RM570 (+RM290)

It seems that ATI Radeon HD 5770 is a good buy now if you were to buy the Studio XPS 8100 computer from Dell Malaysia.

How much computer memory do you need?

Computer memory (RAM) used to be expensive stuff. However, there had been tremendous drop in RAM price around 2008 and bottomed up in mid-2009. Although now the RAM price has risen back about 100% from its historical bottom, it is still consider affortable to buy RAM in Gigabytes (instead of in Megabytes).

However, buying too much RAM is still a kind of wastage, as there might be portion of RAM that will never be used. So, how much computer memory do you actually need?

I have done some study about this in the Internet, including a report in Tom's Hardware which concluded that having more RAM does not always mean getting faster performance, and would like to put down my opinion as follow:

• If your computer is running on 32-bit operating system, you do not need more than 3GB RAM, as the maximum supported RAM by your operating system is around 3.5GB only. Any amount of RAM more than that will be completely wasted.
• There is a maximum amount of RAM supported by your computer motherboard. Older model (typically manufactured before 2007) might only support up to 2GB RAM only. Any amount of RAM more than supported will be completely wasted. Check the specification of the motherboard.
• If you use the computer for 3D games, audio and video encoding, 3GB RAM is sufficient to you.
• If you use the computer for normal application which is not too memory intensive, 2GB RAM is sufficient to you.
• If you use the computer for multitasking, always running several applications at the same time, 4GB RAM should be sufficient to you.
• If you use the computer as database server, or running multiple operating systems with virtualization, then you should go for the maximum affortable RAM amount. Nowadays RAM module of 2GB is still cheap, but more than that would still be expensive. If your computer motherboard has 4 RAM slots, you can go for 4 x 2GB = 8GB of RAM.
• Unless you are using the computer as multiuser server, normally you don't need more than 8GB RAM.

It is always a good idea to leave some spare RAM slots for future expansion when the RAM price gets even cheaper, and the computer software become more memory hungry then. As such, no need to spend money on more RAM than 8GB unless really needed now.

Calculate the recommended power supply wattage for desktop computer

If you are going to DIY build a desktop computer, you might be wondering how much wattage of power supply unit (PSU) should your computer use, that will be sufficient and not overkill.

In fact, you can calculate the recommended power supply wattage using the online eXtreme Power Supply Calculator, claimed to be "the only power supply calculator trusted by PSU manufacturers and computer enthusiasts".

Just click on either one of the links below:

• The default eXtreme PSU Calculator Lite
• Thermaltake Power Supply Calculator
• Cooler Master Power Supply Calculator

This handy tool will calculate the estimated power consumption based on information including the motherboard, CPU, video card, RAM, harddisk, disc drives, PCI cards, PCI Express cards, USB devices, fans, cooling system, etc.