So you just heard about the 1Ghz intel pentium III or AMD Athlon. They have ground breaking performance and can be so useful to you, your word document will load a few milliseconds faster and your excel presentation a few more milliseconds faster and finally your e-mail a few microseconds faster (eh!!!)? and will make your wallet a lot lighter.

Actually speaking we have come beyond a point where a change in processor or graphic card will make your workesheets, spreadsheet or excel presentation any faster .These highend processor are normally required for highend 3D graphies. You won't notice any difference in the working of a spreadsheet or e-mail on a PII 400Mhz & PIII 1Ghz. A processor alone cannot make a PC fast. If you have a motherboard, a fast harddisk ,a newer 3D graphic card & a soundcard which does not put much load on cpu, you have a good performing multimedia p.c. Your networking speed does not depend on your processors but on the speed of your modem, condition of your telephone line & ISP traffic etc.

This does not mean you can make do with a 486 but a AMD K6-III or celeron are well upto the mark so was PII which is now discontinued even PIII & Athlon below 550 have almost been discontinued. Do you really need PIII & Athlon 550 MHz to watch movies, web browsing, programming.

Compared to a PIII, a celeron has a slower FSB (Front side bus in other words M/B speed) i.e 66 MHz so you may find some speed difference while transfering large amount of data. This has been enforced by intel cause celeron @ 100 MHz FSB was matching the performance of the much higher priced PII at the same MHz. AMD K-6III on the other hand has 100 MHz FSB but it's floating point ( required for large calculation during 3D graphics) is not so great. But it contains special instructs 3D-NOW! to enhance graphics, for softwares which can take advantage of this instructs the performance difference is reduced to quite some extent. All the four mentioned processors have different motherboards celeron (socket 370), K6-III (super 7), Athlon (slot-A or newer socket-A), p-III (slot-1 or newer PPGA) so switching between them is not so easy unless you havea dual processor mainboard.

Mainboard is the second most important part of the PC but it is also one of the most neglected . There is quite some performance difference between different chip sets on the mainboard and even between mainboards having same chipsets but from different manufacturers while buying AMD processors choice is very limited for K6-III it's between Ali and Via, the Ali chipsets have hardware conflicts with 3D graphics card from nVIDIA like TNT, TNT-2. For Athlon choice is ASUS K7 M/V or newer chipsets.For P-III prefer a 440-BX board compared to 440-ZX board as it is a scaled down lower performing version.The new 810 boards having integrated display and audio is a very economical choice but it's video cannot be upgraded as it does not have a AGP slot. The newer Via chipsets which support 133 MHz FSB with 133 MHz SDRAM are a very good choice. The new P-IIIE (Coppermine) requires a Intel 820 mainboard which support 133 MHz FSB and RDRAM.

when concerning memory, 64 MB is minimum and the more the morrer.100 MHz is standard but 133 MHz SDRAM is a very good choice if the mainboard supports it's RDRAM which is supported by 820 mainboard is very expensive and the performance difference does not justify the price .DDR-RAM is a promising technology which has performance boost at a much lower price.

Display card is another PC component which is very much neglected .The SiS and Trident card which are used in most PC are OK for normal application but perform very poorly in graphic intensive applications. An Intel I-740 or RIVA 128 chipset AGP card with 8 MB are a good solution for normal users, for serious gamers and persons involved in image editing, animations a 16 MB card is recommended. Cards like voodoo-banshee and voodoo-3 are good for games and nVIDIA TNT and TNT-2 are good for general purpose graphics.

In a hot country like India heat is a major problem, it can reduce the CPU's life to quite an extent.ATX cabinet are much roomier than older AT standard cabinets.They also have provision for adding additional cooling fans which will help the CPU to keep it's cool.