Continuing with the series of posts of the best value components you can buy for your computer, this section is all about RAM. RAM is a component of the PC which is essential to performance and depending on a number of factors, the ideal amount of RAM can differ from person to person. RAM also has one wonderful quality, it is dirt cheap! This gives you little excuse for skimping on it but there is a point where you will be spending a significant amount of money for very little gain in performance.

For choosing the amount of RAM, there is a few things you need to consider. Firstly, the amount you need. Many computers you buy ship with 4GB of RAM standard and very few cheap computers will come with 2GB. Regardless of your budget, I recommend going with a minimum of 4GB of RAM but to ensure that your computer runs smoothly for many years to come, 8GB is probably going to be a better choice. I would also buy the minimum number of sticks of RAM you need to as this allows you to upgrade your computer in the future (so, instead of getting 4 2GB sticks, get 2 4GB sticks instead - this will often be cheaper). 2 4GB sticks is a good amount and can be bought for under $50 if you try to get the cheapest price.

Next, you need to look at the speed. Often this will not severely affect your computers performance but the goal here is to avoid bottlenecks. The latest processors all work fine with 1066 or 1333MHz DDR3. Faster memory than this will be useless for most people. Where it will come in handy is for overclockers since as you overclock your CPU, the FSB speed increases meaning you need faster memory to stop bottlenecks from occurring and negating the performance benefit of overclocking.

Taking all this into consideration, at the moment it looks like the best value RAM for everyday use is the Kingston KVR 4GBx2 kit which is rated at 1333MHz. At the time of writing it costs $48 which is essentially the cheapest you can get this type of RAM. Kingston is also a well known brand with good quality products so despite its low price, the RAM should be top notch.

If you have an old computer which only supports DDR2 or DDR then you may have a harder time locating RAM. On top of this it will be quite expensive due to a lower supply. 1GB of Kingston DDR RAM will cost the same amount as 8GB of DDR3 RAM. If your computer is this old, you may want to consider upgrading it as it will be cheaper in the long run rather than replacing parts with legacy hardware which is difficult to find and technologically inferior for a premium price.

In the fast moving world of technology, it can become impossible to keep up with the ever changing landscape. This is why I have introduced this new series of posts to give you guys an idea of what is upcoming in the world of computers and whether it is worth the wait or better to just buy what is currently on offer. New technology also leads to price drops in the older (but not outdated) technology. For example, when Sandy Bridge processors from Intel came out, they offered a large jump in processing power as well as efficiency but laptops with the older generation of i5 and i7 could be found for $500-700, a far cry from the $1700 they were available for 6 months before. If you're willing to buy slightly older technology, the newer components can lead to massive savings for you especially as manufacturers and shops try to clear out their stocks. So what's new in the world of CPUs?

Intel

Intel is on the verge of releasing its new Ivy Bridge processors built on the 22nm architecture. They should by unveiled early next year and released soon after. It promises processors with more cores, more power and more efficiency than the previous generation as well as bringing 6 core processes to a more mainstream level (although still at the higher end). Obviously the high end will be well above $1000 but it should bring prices of existing Sandy Bridge processors down significantly. Sandy Bridge should be fine for the majority of people and is perfectly adequate for gaming as well. The potential cost savings are huge for those who want to build a cheap desktop or buy a new laptop. The advantages of upgrading to Ivy Bridge would be significant mainly for laptop users. The 22nm manufacturing process means less heat generated with more power. It should also be good news for overclockers especially due to the already high clock speeds and availability of multiplier unlocked processors.

AMD

AMD has already released their Bulldozer processors which includes the highest clock speed processor currently available however benchmarks have been disappointing. An interesting direction AMD seems to be taking is in launching Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) which aim to combine the roles of CPUs and graphics cards into one. This has the advantage of utilising the power of often unused graphics cards for everyday tasks. This also provides the benefit of lower power usage and less components in the system. This new concept will be of particular importance to laptops due to these key aspects. AMD is expected to replace its Bulldozer processors with the new Piledriver architecture in mid-late 2012. One key point about AMD processors is they are also significantly cheaper than Intel ones but offer similar performance. These soon to be released processors are capable of competing directly with both Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge processors from Intel and can be an excellent choice for those with a tight budget not looking to skimp on performance.

This is a brief summary of things to come in 2012. If you are considering building or buying a new computer, you might want to wait a few months for these new technologies to be released, either to have the latest and greatest or save a few bucks on the previous generation products. Please note that this information is based on leaked roadmaps and may not be 100% accurate, it is just meant to be used as a rough guide. The next post will cover motherboards.

With more and more manufacturers updating their products to include SSDs you might be wondering if it is time to make the move.

SSD stands for solid state disk. It is essentially the same as a hard drive except instead of using magnetic storage and moving parts, it uses flash memory which has no moving parts. Less moving parts means less mechanical components to fail as well as significantly faster read and write speeds. This makes SSDs highly shock proof since there is nothing mechanical to break inside. Although SSDs have been out for quite a while, for the most part they have been eye-wateringly expensive and, depending on how you look at it, they still can be. The reason for the high price is that flash memory is quite expensive but is slowly becoming cheaper. This is why RAM is coming in large quantities on computers now. 5 years ago it would have cost a lot of money to have 12GB of RAM, today it is considerably less and fast becoming the norm. As time goes on, capacities such as 128GB and 256GB will come down in price which should allow SSDs to replace the hard drive.

One of the benefits of SSDs is the speed. In many systems, the hard drive is the bottleneck of the system meaning that your computer can have the best and fastest of everything but it will be held up by the slow transfer speeds of your hard drive. For example, if you think about old hard drive based iPods, you would remember them being okay to use but sometimes they got laggy and certain items took ages to load. Then, when you make the transition to an all flash iPod it would have been a lot snappier and overall a better experience. This is because of the flash memory. SSDs should bring a similar feeling to PCs which is why manufacturers are starting to use them more and more.

One of the biggest turn-offs though is the incredibly high price when compared to the amount of storage on offer. A 320GB Western Digital hard drive for notebooks costs around $50 while a 60GB Corsair SSD costs around $115. You can already see that the price per gigabyte is quite a bit higher than the regular hard drive. Then, sticking to the same product line, the largest SSD you can buy is 240GB which comes in at a whopping $560. For the same amount you could buy 3 or 4 regular 1TB hard drives. Clearly SSDs are not ideal for those with large file libraries.

One way of getting the performance of an SSD without spending a fortune is to consider getting two drives. One small (around 80-100GB) to install windows on as well as put your install files for programs on. These are the files your computer uses regularly and having them on an SSD will give you the most benefit. The other disk should be a large regular hard disk to put all of you other files on (videos, photos, music etc.) as you don't access these files regularly and are unlikely to see a huge performance boost if you put them on an SSD anyway.

Another solution is to consider a hybrid hard drive. These are regular hard drives with a small flash storage cache (around 4GB on Seagates). Files can be temporarily put in the cache to be accessed and you will get significant performance improvements over a regular hard drive. Manufacturers claim that you can get SSD-like performance from these drives. The Seagate 2.5" Momentus XT with 500GB of storage and a 4GB SSD cache costs$116. You do pay a price premium for them but you get huge performance increases for a fraction of the cost of an equivalently sized SSD so you can't argue with that.

The final obstacle is, what if you want to put an SSD in your desktop? Since SSDs are mostly available in 2.5" sizes there are two options. One is to buy an adaptor like this one to allow a normal 2.5" SSD to fit inside a regular ATX case which usually only houses 3.5" disks. The other option is to buy a PCI Express SSD. These are SSDs which fit into the PCI-express slot on your desktop (x4 or greater). They are currently only made by OCZ but they are a pretty novel idea. Unfortunately these are significantly more expensive than a normal SSD, costing $400 for the base 100GB model.

The OCZ Revodrive - PCIe SSD

SSDs are here to stay but it's going to take a while for them to catch on. Most people who use them are enthusiasts or people who can afford expensive(ish) laptops. As time goes on storage capacities will increase and prices will come down bringing them into the main stream.

Recently, I had to come up with the task of choosing a new laptop to buy. It seems like an easy task until you actually try it. Everywhere you go, every brand, every model - nothing is perfect! You start off with a good idea of what type of laptop you want, the amount of power, the battery life and you find that this laptop you've been picturing in your head simply doesn't exist.

Personally, I wanted a laptop which had a decent graphics card, at least an i5 processor and an anti glare screen for around $1700. The problem being that no one who wanted an anti glare screen had any need for a powerful laptop so you either had to go for an under powered laptop with the screen you want or a laptop with all the power you could need but a screen you can never see unless you close all the curtains and turn off the lights. Anything which looked to be perfect ended up costing around $3000 because it had all these other features which i had no need for.

I'm sure other people have had similar dilemmas when trying to buy a computer, there is nothing which quite fits everything you require for. This means that your purchase ends up being a series of trade offs. For me, I valued power so I got something which was not very expensive, had heaps of grunt and had a full HD screen (still glary). It seemed like an almost perfect laptop, until when I brought it home. I realised it only had a 1.5 hour battery life!

Many people are tempted, when building their own computer, to dedicate the majority of their budget to get the best performing components they can afford. This leads to parts like the case which are deemed as unimportant to get very little of the budget. You may be tempted to go to your local computer shop and see a whole bunch of cases around the $120 mark but see one no-name brand case which looks pretty cool and is only $80. STOP!

Before buying this case, have a look at it. What does it feel like? Do the parts seem cheap? Do the different panels fit on properly? Some cheap cases can be an absolute bargain, getting good quality at a low price but there are some fancy cheap cases which may come with LCD screens and cool LEDs but there are areas where there have been cut backs. For example, if the case comes with a fan, this could be the cheapest and noisiest fan available. Sure you could always invest in a better fan, but what if you end up with a more serious problem than that?

An issue you will probably not even consider is the wiring inside the case. The wire which connects the power switches to the motherboard and the card reader to the USB slot. Recently, a firend wanted me to build him a computer. He decided to buy the parts himself and asked me to assemble it. The parts he bought were quite good but he decided get a cheaper case. Once the computer was built, we tested it out and checked everything was working. It was working okay but we could smell something coming from the computer. It got worse when the computer stayed on for longer. We searched around but couldn't see any smoke. Eventually after about half an hour, we took of the front panel and saw that the wire leading from the power switch to the motherboard was smoking. The casing had melted and the nearby wires were also getting affected.

The reason for the smoke was dodgy wiring. The case manufacturer had tried to combine two wires into one and they ended up shorting. This is a problem which you would not expect in a case and if left unnoticed, could cause a fire and ruin the computer and potentially burn down a house. The fact is that with well known manufacturers, you can trust their products and you know there is a degree of quality to them. Cheaper cases often don't have the same quality and this can lead to big problems down the track.

So next time you are building a computer for yourself or someone else and think of skimping on the case, think again.

Today I thought I would talk about the advantages which smaller fabrication processes offer. All of the next gen chips are made on smaller and smaller processes. Intel has recently announced their 32nm fabrication process for the next generation processors. Nvidia has started manufacturing their latest GPUs on 55nm processes. So what does all this mean?

Smaller fabrication processes not only benefit the manufacturer but also the end user. They run much cooler and are more power efficient than older processes. If this isn't enough, even the costs come down significantly. An example of this is Intel's Wolfdale. Previously, an all round processsor would have been 2.4GHz and cost around $300. Intel released a 3.0GHz processor for $250 which was not only faster but it could be overclocked like no other processor and still run relatively cool. An Intel E8400 at 3.0GHz could be overclocked to 3.6GHz with no problems whereas previous Intel processors struggled to make such a speed jump without extra cooling.

This means that a 32nm processor will outshine a 45nm processor in everything. Speed, overclocking ability and cooling. Not only this but it will mean that not only gamers will have access to incredibly fast processors due to their affordable price. Anyone will be able to get a processor with a speed greater than 3.0GHz. The effect on Video Cards will be similar. Discrete graphics cards will not be limited to just users needing high performance. Not only this, but it adds the potential to easily build powerful graphics chips into motherboards as cooling will be less of a problem and it will take up less space. Currently Nvidia's latest graphics card, the GTX 295 is fast but it runs incredibly hot. It is impossible to run it in triple SLI with only air cooling. Part of the problem is the 65nm chip. This needs more power and runs very hot. In the future Graphics card manufacturers can fit similar performance in a smaller more accessible package. A smaller process also means more can be crammed onto the chip. As you can see from the above image, Intel is able to fit a graphics chip and memory controller into the processor now as well!

This is what these smaller fabrication processes mean. The advantages they give us are huge. Computers could be put in places you never thought possible. IBM is experimenting with chips right now using structures similar to DNA. This allows manufacturing processes as small as 22nm.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - International Business Machines Corp is looking to the building blocks of our bodies -- DNA -- to be the structure of next-generation microchips.

As chipmakers compete to develop ever-smaller chips at cheaper prices, designers are struggling to cut costs.

Artificial DNA nanostructures, or "DNA origami" may provide a cheap framework on which to build tiny microchips, according to a paper published on Sunday in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Microchips are used in computers, cell phones and other electronic devices.

"This is the first demonstration of using biological molecules to help with processing in the semiconductor industry," IBM research manager Spike Narayan said in an interview with Reuters.

"Basically, this is telling us that biological structures like DNA actually offer some very reproducible, repetitive kinds of patterns that we can actually leverage in semiconductor processes," he said.

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The new, slimmer and lighter PSP

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Sony Corp unveiled on Tuesday a smaller, lighter PlayStation handled game device called the PSP Go, in a race to catch rival Nintendo in an intensely competitive mobile games arena.

Hours before, Nintendo said it sold more than 15 million units of its blockbuster "Wii Fit" fitness game, and plans an update -- the Wii Fit Plus -- later this year.

Sales of the Wii have dwarfed those of more technically souped-up and pricier rival consoles from Microsoft Corp and Sony Corp, by broadening its audience beyond hard-core video gamers.

On the second day of E3, the largest U.S. video games conference, Sony and Nintendo vied for the spotlight, a day after rival console-maker Microsoft charmed audiences with its "Natal": groundbreaking technology utilizing full-body motion-capture for gamers.

It was the first full day of the show, which is expected to draw some 40,000 game enthusiasts.

Many cheered and whooped at the press event at mere glimpses of new versions of popular games like "God of War" and "Super Mario Bros.," or at the mention of secretive ones like "Agent," which is being developed for the PS3 by the creators of "Grand Theft Auto."

Sony's PSP Go goes on sale October 1 in North America and Europe for about $249, before hitting stores in Japan November 1. It will be half the size of Sony's current PSP 3000 and 40 percent lighter, executives said.

Source:Reuters