U R AMD

Pranay Rupani asked:


Inside the processor there has been an increased concentration of cores (number of CPU’s on a single chip). So the effect of more cores on a single chip mimics the physical presence of two or more processors requiring lesser energy because of the unique architecture and providing more efficiency. The latest processors have four cores, but manufacturers like Intel and AMD have released roadmaps for octal core processors stated for release in 2009 thereby setting the stage for 12, 16, and 20… processors on a single integrated circuit.

With all these cores in a tiny silver of silicon, networking and data transfer between the cores in the die (single integrated circuit) will need to have a quantum change. Unlike today’s processor architecture where running different programs and applications means that the processor switches rapidly between them, future designs with say a hundred cores will have separate cores dedicated to individual processes. This means that word processing would be taken care of by one core, graphics processing by another, running a game on the third and so on. In such a scenario, current bus transfers data rates (transfer of data from one part of the chip to the other) simply cannot keep up. Going by the current architecture the data transfer rate would be lagging behind so badly that it would mean that most of the cores would be starved of data, and instead of speeding up individual applications they would slow down considerably.

To get around the inter-chip networking bottlenecks, companies like Intel and Rambus have been working on prototypes of newer architectural models of chip design. Rambus has a model called Terabyte Bandwidth Initiative (TBI) and Intel’s programme is called Terascale Computing Research Program. Intel has released an eighty core chip that delivers super computer grade speeds on desktop computers. The finger-nail sized processor’s performance is 1.81 trillion floating point calculations per second at the speed of 5.7 gigahertz which is about three hundred times faster than the fastest processors available in the market today. Data transfer rates achieved by these models have peak rates of up to 2.92 terabits per second which is approximately 374 gigabytes per second, putting them in numbers fifteen hundred full length movies per second.

How is all this going to be possible? In Intel’s case each core has a 5-port message passing mesh network which is connected in a two dimensional mesh network with other cores that implement message passing- an efficient local area network on a chip. The cores will communicate with each better and a router will ensure that the right data goes to the right chip. Think of it like every chip knows what the other is doing and shares the workload because of the excellent communications network. This architecture is a lot more scalable than present day multi-core technologies in terms of speed and interconnectivity. The Rambus network differs in the sense that instead of sending one message per wire it has the capacity to send multiple messages per wire resulting in faster transfer. These technologies are stated to come in the market by 2010 according to the companies’ statements.

ProVFX Visual Effects and Editing School has been written by Pranay Rupani who is a Freelance Writer

Felix K asked:


Two of the best manufacturers of CPU processors are Intel and AMD Athlon.  These two companies have been raging war against each other ever since AMD Athlon beat Intel to releasing a 64bit processor.  But despite this, AMD Athlon computers have not completely won the battle yet.  The two companies have been trying to beat the competitor in terms of price, clock speed or performance, power consumption and heat production. There have been processor releases one after the other from these companies, making CPU processor shopping even more difficult.  The good thing though with this war between Intel and AMD Athlon is that we are given an array of the best processors.

 

AMD Athlon computers have been around for a while now.  They started with the release of the Athlon classic x86 processor way back when Intel’s Pentium 3 was the market leader.  AMD Athlon’s first processor barely touched Intel’s market then.  But in 2000, AMD Athlon dropped a bomb on Intel by releasing its Thunderbird processor.  This time, AMD Athlon computers gained the market leader title over Intel’s Pentium 3.  And ever since then, AMD Athlon has been competitively coming up with processors that seem to match, if not over perform Intel processors.

 

Let’s talk about speed!

 

If you are on the look out for a processor, you will probably check how AMD Athlon processors match with Intel’s in terms of price and performance.  Over the years, AMD Athlon has continually tried to improve its clock speed  and other features.  Current AMD Athlon processors are the 64 x2 series and 64 fx series.  The 64 x2 series offers a clock speed range from 2.3 GHz and 3.0 GHz while the 64 fx series offers a clock speed range from 2.6 GHz to 3.0 GHz.  AMD Athlon may not always match or over perform every Intel processor but the latest processor did.  The fx -74 processor out performs Intel’s Core 2 Extreme QX6700, with a 3.00 GHz clock speed compared to the latter’s slower 2.66GHz speed.

 

The Price Factor

 

Since AMD Athlon is the newer brand, it is only natural that they offer  affordable prices.  In fact, all their prices are lesser compared to Intel’s.  The AMD Athlon 64 x2 series for instance is lower priced, between $170 and $500, compared to Intel Core 2 Duo series which are priced between $180 and $600.  AMD Athlon processors are definitely more affordable, although the latest 64 fx – 74 is equally priced to its Intel counterpart.

 

Diversifying to Smaller Processors

 

AMD Athlon has also touched the market of notebook processors, with the Turion Series and the Mobile Athlon XP.  To fit a notebook’s size, these types of processors are basically smaller, has lower heat production and power consumption.

 

Choosing the Right Processor

 

Although speed and price are important factors to consider when you buy processors, your PC usage should be the first determining factor.  Why would you go for a high-speed processor when your PC usage won’t reach that speed?  If your PC use is limited to word processing and internet surfing only, choosing from the list of AMD Athlon processors will have no difference.  However, if you use your PC for high-speed computer games that requires faster clock-speed, you may want to check the top part of the AMD Athlon computers list.

 

Moreover, you may also want to consider buying cooling fans if you go with high-speed processors.  Although AMD Athlon processors are manufactured to have lower heat production, cooling fans will help cool the processors more effectively especially if you plan to over-clock your CPU.

os geek asked:


For the past few years, in the processor field, the trend has been slowly shifting from a single high Hz CPU to multicore processors. Intel has Xeon dual core and has managed to paste two such chips to bring out what it calls quad core, AMD still has only Opteron dual-core CPUs and is likely to release native quad-core chip next year. There are other smaller players like Azul claiming to have much more cores in a CPU but the real players are only four of them, the remaining two being IBM and Sun Microsystems. IBM along with partners worked on designing Cell chip but it is a special-purpose processor, not for general computing. Sun surprised everyone last year with its eight-core Niagara processor also known as UltraSparc T1. It not only had eight cores in a single chip, but has the capability to run 4 simultaneous hardware threads in each of them giving an impression to the OS of running on a 32 CPU machine.

Sun is going to follow it with Niagara 2 which will have twice the number of threads in each core, thus a virtual 64 threads in eight cores! While Niagara has one floating point unit (FPU) shared by all 8 cores thus slowing down the floating point performance, Niagara 2 will have an FPU for each core. It’ll also run with a higher clock rate. So it will be a complete server-on-a-chip when it comes out next year. Seems to be the most interesting processor at present.

More about Niagara 1 at :

Acehardware http://www.aceshardware.com/read_news.jsp?id=80000603

about Niagara 2 :

Official Sun doc: http://www.opensparc.net/publications/presentations/niagara-2-a-highly-threaded-server-on-a-chip.html

and

News.com

http://news.com.com/Suns+Niagara+2+doubles+down+with+twice+the+threads/210-41006_3-6108880.html

Cell processor info at

Offician IBM link : http://www.research.ibm.com/cell

article source : http://osgeek.blogspot.com/2006/12/trends-in-cpu-design_11.html

Sandra Prior asked:


History began in 1996. Well, really it began in 1981, when screens ousted printers as the primary way of viewing a computer’s output, leading IBM to release their MDA video card. With a change 4KB of memory and capable of actual electronic text, it was quite the monster.

Skip forward to 1987 and VGA’s eye-popping 640×480 resolution and 256 colors, and PC gaming was finally ready to go large. Add another ten years to that, and there we are at the 3DFX Voodoo graphics accelerator, the card that begat the age of 3D.

Sure, there were 3D accelerator add-in cards doing the rounds over a year prior to the release of the now famous Voodoo board – including NVIDIA and ATI’s first efforts, but it was 3DFX’s opening salvo that changed everything. Prior to 3D cards, we did have 3D games of a sort – but super-blocky, jerky-slow 3D that was painfully managed by the CPU and not the clean edges and natural framerates a dedicated 3D rendering device could offer.

The Voodoo was something every PC gamer craved and – at odds with today’s ridiculously over-priced top-end cards – could actually afford, as a crash in memory prices meant the sporty 4MB of video RAM it carried didn’t cost the Earth. It was a curious beast – with no 2D rendering capabilities of its own, this PCI board had to be linked via daisy-chain cable to the PC’s standard VGA output, only flexing its muscle during 3D games. The external cable meant a little degradation of image quality, in both 3D and 2D, but no-one really cared. They were too busy rotating their in-game cameras around Lara Croft’s curveless curves, awestruck.

The scale of what 3DFX achieved with the Voodoo is less evident from the card itself, and more in how it birthed a raft of competition, and kickstarted the 3D revolution. If you thought the NVIDIA-AMD graphics bickering is bitter, confusing and exploitative today, back in the late 1990s, there were over a dozen 3D chip manufacturers warring for a slice of PC gaming pie. PowerVR, Rendition, S3, Trident, 3D Labs, Matrox… Big names that once earned big money became, come the early years of the 21st century, forgotten casualties of the brutal GeForce-Radeon war. Some still survive in one form or another, others are gone entirely. Including 3DFX itself, but we’ll get to that later.

3DFX also did the unthinkable: they defeated Microsoft. While DirectX, to all intents and purposes, is now the only way in which a graphics card communicates with a Windows game, back in the Voodoo era it was crushed beneath the heel of 3DFX’s own Glide API. Not that it was any less evil. While DirectX was and is Microsoft’s attempt to inextricably bind PC gaming to Windows, Glide was as happy in the then-still-prevalent DOS as it was in Windows 95. However, it only played nice with 3DFX chips, whereas DirectX’s so-called hardware abstraction layer enabled it to play nicely with a vast range of different cards, so long as they conformed to a few Microsoftian rules.

Glide vs DirectX

In theory, developers would much prefer a system which required that they only had to code for one standard rather than come up with multiple Tenderers – and, eventually, that did become the case. In the mid-to-late 90s though, the earliest DirectXes – specifically, their DirectsD component – were woefully inefficient, and suffered very vocal criticism from the likes of id’s John Carmack. Glide may only have talked to Voodoos, but that it talked directly to them rather than through the fluff of an all-purpose software layer made it demon-fast That, coupled with the card’s own raw performance, made the Voodoo impossibly attractive to gamers – and so the industry widely adopted Glide. Glide itself was an extensive modification of OpenGL, another hardware-neutral standard which predated and then rivaled DirectsD. Created by high-end workstation manufacturer SGI and then expanded by a sizeable consortium of hardware and software developers, OpenGL was as close as you could get to an altruistic 3D API. While it continues to this day, had it been more successful in fighting off the Microsoft challenge, we wouldn’t now suffer perverse situations, such as having to buy Vista if we want the best-looking games.

Another 3DFX masterstroke in the late-90s was the custom MiniGL driver that brought Voodoo power to OpenGL games -specifically, to id’s newly-released Quake. The card’s close identification with the shooter that popularized both online deathmatch and true 3D gaming – as opposed to Doom, Duke Nukem 3D et al’s fudging-it approach of 2D sprites and a 3D viewpoint that only worked when looking straight ahead – only cemented its must-have cred.

As 3D gaming grew and grew, 3DFX’s dominance seemed unassailable. The Voodoo 2 was a refinement of the first chip, and made a few image quality sacrifices compared to rival cards – notably no 32-bit color support or resolutions above 800×600 – but again offered so much more raw performance than anything else. The Voodoo Rush could handle 2D as well as 3D, and though the latter’s performance dipped, it made for an easy and appealing single upgrade. And SLI, in its original form, long before NVIDIA got to it, birthed the ******** gaming hardware enthusiast – two Voodoo 2s in one PC, offering yet more speed and, best of all, razor-sharp 1024×768 resolution.

So what went wrong? Unfortunately, riches begat the desire for further riches. As remains the case today for NVIDIA and ATI, 3DFX didn’t actually manufacture 3D cards themselves – they just licensed their chips to third party firms with massive silicon fabs and took a cut of the profits. Come the Voodoo 3,3DFX had other plans – in 1998 they bought up STB Technologies, one of the bigger card-builders of the time. The plan was to then directly sell the highly-anticipated (but ultimately disappointing) Voodoo 3 and earn mega-bucks. Unfortunately, this decision severely marked most of the other third-party manufacturers, who summarily refused to buy future Voodoo chips. The combination of this, 3DFX’s retail inexperience, and the superior feature set (though lesser performance) of NVIDIA’s RIVA TNT2 card caused major damage to the firm’s coffers. NVIDIA added insult to injury with the GeForce 256, whose performance absolutely demolished the Voodoo 3.3DFX’s response to this first GeForce, the consumer-bewildering simultaneous release of the Voodoo 4 and 5, came too late. The superior GeForce 2 and its new arch-rival the ATI Radeon had already arrived, and Microsoft’s Direct3D API was finally proving much more of a developer darling than Glide.

Faced with bankruptcy, in 2001 3DFX agreed to be bought out by NVIDIA.

One secret of NVIDIA and ATI’s success was hardware transform and lighting. Prior to T&L, what a 3D card did was to dramatically speed up the rendering of textured polygons – but, in very simple terms, it didn’t really do anything to the resulting 3D scene. Lighting and manipulating the polygons was still left to the processor, which frankly had more than enough on its plate already, what with Al and scripting and physics and all that. The first GeForces and Radeons took this strain off processors, and suddenly there was one less restraint on a game’s performance. The expensive GeForce 256 was seen as a performance revelation, but it took a while for hardware T&L-enabled games to make an appearance. When they did, the superior GeForce 2 range was in full swing – most pertinently in its super-affordable MX flavor. This in itself was a turning point. It was the real beginning of today’s hideously confusing splintering of 3D card product lines in order to hit every possible girth of wallet. All told, eight different flavors of GeForce 2 snuck out of NVIDIA’s doors. Meantime, ATI was offering roughly similar variants of its new, and comparable Radeon range.

Both the earliest GeForces and Radeons had made faltering footsteps into pixel and vertex shaders, which were arguably the last real paradigm shift in 3D cards before they crystallized into the current trend of refinements-upon-a-theme. It was, however, the GeForce 3’s (and, later, the Radeon 8500’s) programmable pixel and vertex shaders that really made a difference – partly because they were the first to be fully compliant with Microsoft’s DirectX 8, which by that point almost entirely ruled the API roost.

Shady Business

Previously, if a game wanted to render, say, a troll’s leathery skin, it had two choices – slap a bunch of fiat textures over a simple polygonal frame, as seen in the cubist characters of early 3D gaming. Alternatively, painstakingly model that troll with all manner of minute lumps, bumps and crenulations – ie. a whole lot more polygons, which will likely tax the 3D card’s brute 3D rendering too far.

A pixel shader can create the illusion of such topography by applying lighting color and shadowing effects to individual pixels: darken this small area of troll hide and from a slight distance it’ll appear indented, lighten a few pixels here and suddenly they’ll look like a raised wart. No extra polygons required. A pixel shader doesn’t just affect the illusion of surface shape, but also lighting: color a few pixels of troll skin with a subtle range of oranges and yellows, and they’ll appear to reflect the glimmer of a nearby fire.

Then there’s vertex shaders. A vertex is one of a triangle’s (the building blocks of a 3D scene) three points – the meeting spot between two of its lines. A vertex shader can transform that meeting spot, moving or distorting it to create new shapes. The results? Stuff like dimples when a character smiles, clothes that seem to rumple when a limb is moved, the undulating surface of a stormy ocean… Roughly, a pixel shader changes pixel appearance, while a vertex shader changes object shape. While shaders existed pre-GeForce 3, they : weren’t programmable – developers had to make do with a limited range of preset graphical trickery. Come this breakthrough card, they could define their own effects, and thus offer game worlds – and objects within those game worlds – that looked that much more distinct from each other. The GeForce 3 introduced shader pipelines, specialized areas of a GPU that crunch the millions and billions of computations involved in applying shader effects to a 3D scene that (ideally) updates 60 or more times every second.

Over the course of GeForces 3 to 9 and Radeons 8 to HD we’ve seen, along with increases in dockspeed and memory, the numbers of shader pipelines in a GPU increase, so it’s able to process more shader effects more quickly. In tandem with this are improvements in shader modeling – a hardware and software standard that defines what effects can be applied, and how efficiently it can be done. Greater efficiency means greater complexity of effect is possible, so the higher the shader model, the better-looking a game can be. This is not without its problems, as the increasing number of Xbox 360 ports that require shader model 3.0 graphics cards infuriatingly reveal. Your older 3D card might have the horsepower to render Bioshock’s polygons, but because it’s only capable of Shader Model 2.0, it doesn’t know how to interpret all those instructions for per-pixel coloring effects and vertex distortions.

Last year’s DirectX 10, and the GeForce 8/9s and Radeon HDs which support it, introduced Shader Model 4.0, aka unified shaders. Rather than each having dedicated pipelines, the pixel and vertex shaders now share, so the GPU can adapt that much more to exactly what a 3D scene is calling for. So, if a scene doesn’t require too much pixel shading it can instead dedicate more pipelines to vertex shading and vice-versa. And there, essentially, we now sit.

While they superficially seem like grand progress, really multi-card setups such as NVIDIA’s SLI and AMD’s CrossFire are simply applying the grunt of two or more GPUs, and so far not terribly efficiently at that – you can expect a second card to add something in the region of a 30 per cent performance boost. However, we’re potentially approaching another moment of major change. There’s an awful lot of bitter industry arguing about it – not unsurprisingly, as it would likely involve the abandonment of 3D cards in favor of processors. Ray tracing is its name, and the likes of Intel are convinced it’s the future of game graphics. The likes of NVIDIA disagree.

While current 3D cards employ smoke and mirrors to create the appearance of a naturally-lit detailed scene, ray tracing simulates the actual physics of light. A ‘ray’ is cast at every pixel on the screen from a virtual in-game camera. The first object each ray hits calls up a shader program that denotes the surface properties of that object; if it’s reflective, a further ray will be cast from it, and the first object it hits in turn calls up its own shader – and so forth, for each of the scene’s thousands, millions or billions of pixels, for every frame of the game. On top of that, a secondary ’shadow’ ray fires from each object the primary rays have hit towards the scene’s light source(s). If this ray hits another object en route, then the system knows the first object is in shadow. It’s genuine lighting, and this is exactly the system that the likes of Pixar use to render their movies. Thing is, if you’re running a monitor with a resolution of 1280×1204, that’s 1,310,720 pixels, and therefore at least that many rays need to be calculated per frame, plus far more again for all the reflections and shadows and so forth. Bump the resolution up more and you’re easily up to a trillion processor calculations per second. Which is why each frame of a Pixar movie takes hours or days to render.

Gaze into my Ball

The goal for gaming is, of course, real-time ray tracing, and for that we need either obscenely powerful, ultra-multiple core processors, or a specialized processor built specifically for ray calculation. Intel currently have a basic ray-traced version Quake 4 running at 90 frames per second, but they’re using eight-core server chips to do it. That’s a little beyond most gamers’ means for now – but very possibly not-too-distant future territory. Even NVIDIA has grudgingly stated ray tracing is the future – but only part of that future, it claims. It may be that processors will eventually kill off 3D cards, it may be that GPUs, instead, adapt to become specialized ray processors, or it may be that ray tracing happens alongside traditional 3D rendering – the CPU and GPU combining for a best of both worlds situation. In the meantime, John Carmack is talking up the return of the voxel as a possible future.

Either way, a huge change is coming for 3D gaming. After a near-decade of the same old Radeon-versus-GeForce chin-scratching and upgrade cycle, its impossible not be excited about what tomorrow holds.

Eden Ali asked:


The laptop reviews hp pavilion core duo was done by: Michelle Thatcher, on 5.18.07

The laptop reviews hp pavilion core duo laptop computers includes, the dv6000 series’ beautiful, and shiny design makes it among one of the style-conscious producers like Sony, and Apple.

Hp pavilion laptop computers provides a variety of Intel (dv6000t) or AMD (dv6000z) processors. Although the dv6000t we tested didn’t have any outstanding speed records, it was only enough for home use.

The HP Pavilion dv6000 has a dimension of 14″ wide, 10.1″ deep, and 1″ thick, and weighs 6.2 pounds which makes this a light laptop pc. Its AC adapter totals the weight to 7.2 pounds. I love HP Pavilion dv6000’s 15.4″ widescreen display, with a resolution of 1,280×800 which makes it laptop pc good for all use. This laptop pc also has a 1.3 megapixel Webcam, two built-in microphones putting it among one of the best laptop computers.

Similar to all Pavilion laptop computers, the dv6000 also has a row of light-touch buttons, which launches media player and volume control. But the loud beep you get after pressing a key, without options to turn it off makes me dislike it. We love the pavilion dv6000’s touch pad on/off button, and it also makes it confortable to use an external mouse.

The HP Pavilion dv6000 laptop pc provides an average mix of ports for a laptop pc of its size. It has a four-pin firewire, VGA, S-video, and three USB 2.0 ports, with also a microphone jack, and two headphone jacks. It also has card slots which can read the latest ExpressCards plus memorystick, securedigital, memorystick pro, xD formats, andd multimediacard. Its network options has an ethernet modem, and 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi, with bluetooth as an added tool. It also has a double-layer DVD burner which has a lightscribe an allows you to burn labels on compact discs.

Intel provides two subsets within the dv6000 series of laptop pc. The intel dv6000t processors provides a range from 1.86GHz Celeron M 440 to 2.0GHz Core 2 DuoT7200 with also an integrated Intel GMA 950 or discrete Nvidia GeForce Go 7400 graphics, while the dv6000z AMD processors provides a range from 1.8GHz Sempron 3500+ to 2.0GHz Turion 64 X2 TL-60.

This laptop pc has up to 2GB of RAM and hard drives up to a capacity of 200GB, which spins data at a midrange of 5,400rpm.

Predator Computing LLC asked:


br/>Ever since Intel launched its Core2 Duo processors in 2006, AMD has struggled to keep up. In order to compete effectively and maintain its already small market share, AMD has had to slash its prices on its processor lines. AMD has been unable to show a profit for almost two years, which has made it more difficult for the company to move to 45nm (one of the few ways to match Intel’s performance) and streamline their fabrication techniques. In early 2008, AMD launched its Phenom processors. Many wondered if AMD would be able to regain the performance advantage it held for most of 2005 after Intel failed to meet expectations with ultimately unsuccessful enhancements to the Pentium 4; AMD failed. Today, AMD competes by trying to win customers on a solid value proposition. In addition, the company has also tried to give its customers a more solid upgrade path by allowing customers to upgrade in favor of faster processors without any major hardware changes. Soon, AMD will be moving to a 45nm architecture, which, if expectations are correct, should put them within reach of Intel’s best processors, but Intel is ready with a new chip design of their own.

Pros:

Solid Upgrade Path & Integrated Memory Controller

Great Value Proposition

Support for Hybrid SLI via Motherboard Chipset

Cons:

Outperformed By Intel

Lack Solid Innovation

Intel Intel has consistently dominated the desktop processor market in terms of market share since personal computers became mainstream. Due to its size, Intel has been subjective to a variety of lawsuits alleging that Intel should be regulated to promote fairer competition. For years, Intel has consistently fabricated the fastest processors. One is probably familiar with the company’s renown “Pentium” brand. In 2005, the company faced its first real challenge when AMD took the performance crown from them. Intel struck back hard with its subsequent processor offerings and has remained unsurpassed to this day. Intel is currently producing a healthy and broad line of 45nm processors; these processor also have superior overclocking potential because of their efficient design. Around the time AMD is scheduled to launch its 45nm Phenoms, Intel is expected to launch Nahalem, which should improve current performance by 25-30% over existing architecture. Depending on the timing of this launch, Intel could retain its performance crown until late 2009 when AMD finally launches its next processor line.

Pros:

Top Performing

Innovative

Support for DDR3 Memory

Cons:

Performance at a Cost

Poorer Upgradability

Eden Ali asked:


The HP Compaq dc5750 comes in either a microtower configuration or the desktop orientation that we tested. HP calls the latter model a “small form factor” system, but it’s nearly identical in size to Dell’s desktop case. It’s moderately attractive, with horizontal black fins and some shiny black pieces.

The dc5750 uses small, traditional fans inside–one in the power supply, located against the back of the case, and one mounted on top of the CPU’s heat sink. The HP uses an air scoop to channel airflow over the heat sink. The system is reasonably quiet, though not nearly as quiet as the Dell OptiPlex 740 we tested at the same time. HP’s off-the-shelf fans will likely cost less than Dell’s, however, should you need to replace them out of warranty. The Athlon 64 X2 processor used in this PC can take advantage of AMD’s Cool ‘n’ Quiet technology, which allows the PC to adjust the speed and voltage to meet the user’s needs. AMD says that Vista systems can take advantage of the technology without a driver, whereas XP systems require one.

The dc5750 has quick-release mechanisms for its optical drive, power supply, and expansion cards, but they’re not nearly as well designed as the Optiplex 740’s. For example, the expansion slot retainer is a metal piece that’s held in place by the top of the case; remove the top, and the retainer can rattle around.

Our test system had integrated graphics, which we worried would slow Vista’s Aero interface, especially because the system came with only 1GB of system RAM from which the graphics system could steal. But we ran Aero with no problems. Even with integrated graphics, the HP lets you connect two monitors simultaneously–one DVI and one VGA. HP charges $95 for a 128MB ATI 1300 card. The HP L2045w LCD monitor that shipped with our system allows height adjustments, swiveling, and tilting.

In our WorldBench 6 Beta 2 tests, the dc5750 scored a 62, about 11 percent behind the OptiPlex 740. They’re two of the first Vista value systems we’ve tested, and compared with the power Vista systems we’ve tested previously, both systems are quite slow: The fastest system we tested then scored a 129 on our benchmark. If you want more power, you can opt for AMD processors with slightly faster clock speeds, or choose a slightly different system and configure it with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor.

The dc5750 did not have a chassis-intrusion-detection mechanism installed, but HP offers it as a no-cost option. You can buy a port guard to prevent unauthorized USB connections, and you can disable the front-mounted USB ports in the password-protected BIOS. HP offers a security sleeve for mounting the system under a desk or on a wall, but only for use with the desktop version.

You can use the Trusted Platform Module security chip embedded in the motherboards along with included software to encrypt passwords and document folders. The chip works with Vista’s Bit Locker security feature, which lets you encrypt your entire hard drive.

HP offers 24/7 tech support and next-business-day on-site warranty service, and you can tack on same-day on-site service to a three-year warranty for $149 extra. Readers in our most recent reliability and service survey scored HP fourth from the bottom, with average marks in every category but “satisfaction with reliability,” where it received a below-average score.

With its many security options, the dc5750 is a good choice if you want a PC that won’t grow legs. But the OptiPlex 740 line, while perhaps not quite as generous with the security add-ons, has a better-designed case and a lower noise output. Get more info about other laptop pc…