• Welcome to Overclockers Forums! Join us to reply in threads, receive reduced ads, and to customize your site experience!

Ive been in jail for 8 years

Overclockers is supported by our readers. When you click a link to make a purchase, we may earn a commission. Learn More.
If you want anyone to reply, pose a more specific question. A book could be written on your question in its current form.
 
Evan said:
Update me on computers please.

thanks:thup:
Click to expand...

They are about 100 times better than they were 8 years ago.

You have a helluva lotta good games to catch up on. Movies too.

Inquiring minds wanna know your story.

edit:

How did you make posts in 2004, 2006 and 2009 if you've been in jail 8 years?
 
robble said:
They are about 100 times better than they were 8 years ago.

You have a helluva lotta good games to catch up on. Movies too.

Inquiring minds wanna know your story.

edit:

How did you make posts in 2004, 2006 and 2009 if you've been in jail 8 years?
Click to expand...

i've seen pics of jails in the net that has pc's desktop in it..
 
Are you planning a build? If so, give us a budget and I'm sure you'll have three or four suggestions in no time :)
 
Evan said:
Update me on computers please.

thanks:thup:
Click to expand...

AGP gave way to PCI Express, now in its third generation.

IDE/PATA gave way to SATA (Serial ATA) drive interface, which is also in its third generation.

Hard drives are still with us but many people opt to use them as a slower storage drive while their main drive is a solid state drive (SSD). This uses very fast flash memory to achieve much higher write/read than a hard drive, giving a nintendo cartridge-like responsiveness to the system. Due to the pricing of SSDs still being higher per GB than HDDs by a lot, most people use an SSD AND an HDD. We are in a transitional period on that front. Eventually flash memory will become so inexpensive that the mechanical hard drive and optical disc will disappear completely. You can get a 4GB USB drive (which have replaced writable CDs/DVD as a method for people to exchange information physically, if they bother to, since mostly this is now done on much faster online connections) for under $10.

USB has seen 2 Generation leaps (you may have seen 2.0 when it just peeked out 8 years ago) and is now in version 3.0 which is very fast. It has effectively obsoleted Firewire which was likely significant when you were last into computers.

AMD purchased ATI and now makes the Radeon series graphics cards. Nvidia is still independent and still making Geforce. Obviously video cards today are a few orders of magnitude over what they were in 2004, with things like the X800 being top of the line then from ATi. Now ATi(AMD) has the 7970 as its top card. A comperison is quite jaw dropping.

We have achieved a massive process shrink down to (at current) 28nm (less for flash memory). The actual connections in a CPU now are so tiny that the electrons started flying away into oblivion, and a new grounding surface needed to be pioneered (Hafnium, Intel) to replace silicon as the ground material. We can now fit over 3 billion transistors on a chip.

We've gone from 'how fast can we make this cpu go' to 'how much stuff can we push through the cpu and get out the other side' with CPUs going to higher and higher counts of cores, more and more cache, more floating point units. While CPUs in 2004 had already made it to 3.2Ghz and beyond, they were single core and very primitive designs. A single core of a 4 core modern CPU like a 2600K could wipe the floor with a P4 at the same clock speed. We did hit a wall and to this day you can't really push a CPU past about 5Ghz on air. Often 5 and a half but that's about it. Those 5.5Ghz buy you a lot more power than they did in the days of a Pentium 4, but we never reached the 10Ghz, 20Ghz, and so on, that everybody expected to be the natural evolution of things. We've simply come at shoving data through the chip from a different angle.

Touching on that same point in the GPU, GPU clocks have remained 'oddly' low, around the 1Ghz mark. They are however, massively parallel processors, able to simultaneously accept and execute dozens, hundreds, and thousands of individual instructions using processing 'pipelines', so the low clock rate is quite misleading. We've basically moved from what is in practice, serial computing to massively parallel computing, though the CPU is technically a serial device to this day. We basically decided to stop trying to make the horse run faster, and instead tied 480 horses together and kept them at the same speed.


Intel has come out as the apparent long term winner of the CPU race, with CPUs becoming more complex and difficult to design, AMD have resigned themselves to merely GPU (Radeon) and APU design. The APU is a new concept (to you) which combines CPU/GPU onto a single die. They are not just on the same chip, but part of the same actual piece of silicon, and work hand in hand to deliver high cost efficiency performance. An APU would be great for playing basic games, all home computing tasks, a media PC, etc. A high end CPU and seperate GPU would be good for serious production type work and high end gaming.

Optical mice completely replaced ball mice

Mechanical switch keyboards have made a comeback as the tool of preference for people who do a lot of typing and for gamers

Soundcards have made surprisingly little progress, really. They do sound better, but not a whole lot. On an interesting sidenote, you may be aware of HDMI (high definition multimedia interface) which is DVI and an audio signal spliced on. It's used for pretty much all TV connections now. HDMI can carry the audio signal from your PC as well. GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA are capable of producing (excellent quality) digital audio as well as their video signals, outputting that on the same HDMI cable, and letting you run that through your home stereo, for instance, bypassing a soundcard altogether. One major soundcard improvement- headphone amplification is a standard part on more and more models. Most people do not USE a soundcard and use either onboard motherboard sound chips or their GPU.

Ram and hard drive prices have come down dramatically. At the moment HD prices have spiked due to a flood in Asia but we saw <$50/TB. Ram has come down below $25/4GB, and is in it's DDR3 generation for desktops, while video cards are using DDR5.

Motherboard design has changed dramatically with the chipset itself being responsible for a far greater number of functions, eliminating the necessity for middlemen as USB 2.0 controllers and SATA controllers. Meanwhile more of the chipset (the North bridge) has been absorbed into the CPU itself, which now performs CPU as well as NB functions.

Memory controllers have moved, naturally, from the Northbridge to the CPU as well, and were the first component to do so, followed by the rest of the bridge (ie PCIE controller)

Everything uses more pins to connect to everything else (except serial connections like SATA which uses less pins than PATA did). Pentium 4 used 478 pins to connect to its socket. i7 (Sandybridge E series) uses 2011 pads (pads have replaced pins).

Case designs are infinitely better thought out in every possible way. Power supply's on the bottom. Beige is completely gone from the world.

Multimonitor and 3D gaming (with glasses) are easily achieved.

Windows is now in version 7 (XP, Vista, 7) which is much less crappy than XP, which a lot of people still surprisingly use making it pretty much the most popular and widest install base version of Windows ever.

Everything is more affordable, though the quality on some things has slipped a bit, in others it hasn't.


and so on, and so on, and so on.
 
Last edited:
Nice read ocnoob. Pretty good summary.

Networking speeds I think is the only thing I expected to see once I started reading but didn't.
 
I.M.O.G. said:
Nice read ocnoob. Pretty good summary.

Networking speeds I think is the only thing I expected to see once I started reading but didn't.
Click to expand...

... (which have replaced writable CDs/DVD as a method for people to exchange information physically, if they bother to, since mostly this is now done on much faster online connections) ....
;)
 
Home networking speeds though are much different than 8 years ago. Many were still using 10Mbit LAN connections but more were on 100Mbit probably, but no one hardly was using gigabit connections then I wouldn't imagine... And wireless was probably mostly 11mbps or maybe 54mbps, when now N networking is what anyone would want to buy.
 
Cooling has come a good way too, for virtually any component in the loop (pun intended). Air cooling with multiple fans, all-in-one water cooling, better water blocks, radiators and pumps. For CPUs, GPUs, memory, board components, hard drives. And better pots for extreme cooling such as LN2.
 
Theocnoob said:
AGP gave way to PCI Express, now in its third generation.

IDE/PATA gave way to SATA (Serial ATA) drive interface, which is also in its third generation.

Hard drives are still with us but many people opt to use them as a slower storage drive while their main drive is a solid state drive (SSD). This uses very fast flash memory to achieve much higher write/read than a hard drive, giving a nintendo cartridge-like responsiveness to the system. Due to the pricing of SSDs still being higher per GB than HDDs by a lot, most people use an SSD AND an HDD. We are in a transitional period on that front. Eventually flash memory will become so inexpensive that the mechanical hard drive and optical disc will disappear completely. You can get a 4GB USB drive (which have replaced writable CDs/DVD as a method for people to exchange information physically, if they bother to, since mostly this is now done on much faster online connections) for under $10.

USB has seen 2 Generation leaps (you may have seen 2.0 when it just peeked out 8 years ago) and is now in version 3.0 which is very fast. It has effectively obsoleted Firewire which was likely significant when you were last into computers.

AMD purchased ATI and now makes the Radeon series graphics cards. Nvidia is still independent and still making Geforce. Obviously video cards today are a few orders of magnitude over what they were in 2004, with things like the X800 being top of the line then from ATi. Now ATi(AMD) has the 7970 as its top card. A comperison is quite jaw dropping.

We have achieved a massive process shrink down to (at current) 28nm (less for flash memory). The actual connections in a CPU now are so tiny that the electrons started flying away into oblivion, and a new grounding surface needed to be pioneered (Hafnium, Intel) to replace silicon as the ground material. We can now fit over 3 billion transistors on a chip.

We've gone from 'how fast can we make this cpu go' to 'how much stuff can we push through the cpu and get out the other side' with CPUs going to higher and higher counts of cores, more and more cache, more floating point units. While CPUs in 2004 had already made it to 3.2Ghz and beyond, they were single core and very primitive designs. A single core of a 4 core modern CPU like a 2600K could wipe the floor with a P4 at the same clock speed. We did hit a wall and to this day you can't really push a CPU past about 5Ghz on air. Often 5 and a half but that's about it. Those 5.5Ghz buy you a lot more power than they did in the days of a Pentium 4, but we never reached the 10Ghz, 20Ghz, and so on, that everybody expected to be the natural evolution of things. We've simply come at shoving data through the chip from a different angle.

Touching on that same point in the GPU, GPU clocks have remained 'oddly' low, around the 1Ghz mark. They are however, massively parallel processors, able to simultaneously accept and execute dozens, hundreds, and thousands of individual instructions using processing 'pipelines', so the low clock rate is quite misleading. We've basically moved from what is in practice, serial computing to massively parallel computing, though the CPU is technically a serial device to this day. We basically decided to stop trying to make the horse run faster, and instead tied 480 horses together and kept them at the same speed.


Intel has come out as the apparent long term winner of the CPU race, with CPUs becoming more complex and difficult to design, AMD have resigned themselves to merely GPU (Radeon) and APU design. The APU is a new concept (to you) which combines CPU/GPU onto a single die. They are not just on the same chip, but part of the same actual piece of silicon, and work hand in hand to deliver high cost efficiency performance. An APU would be great for playing basic games, all home computing tasks, a media PC, etc. A high end CPU and seperate GPU would be good for serious production type work and high end gaming.

Optical mice completely replaced ball mice

Mechanical switch keyboards have made a comeback as the tool of preference for people who do a lot of typing and for gamers

Soundcards have made surprisingly little progress, really. They do sound better, but not a whole lot. On an interesting sidenote, you may be aware of HDMI (high definition multimedia interface) which is DVI and an audio signal spliced on. It's used for pretty much all TV connections now. HDMI can carry the audio signal from your PC as well. GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA are capable of producing (excellent quality) digital audio as well as their video signals, outputting that on the same HDMI cable, and letting you run that through your home stereo, for instance, bypassing a soundcard altogether. One major soundcard improvement- headphone amplification is a standard part on more and more models. Most people do not USE a soundcard and use either onboard motherboard sound chips or their GPU.

Ram and hard drive prices have come down dramatically. At the moment HD prices have spiked due to a flood in Asia but we saw <$50/TB. Ram has come down below $25/4GB, and is in it's DDR3 generation for desktops, while video cards are using DDR5.

Motherboard design has changed dramatically with the chipset itself being responsible for a far greater number of functions, eliminating the necessity for middlemen as USB 2.0 controllers and SATA controllers. Meanwhile more of the chipset (the North bridge) has been absorbed into the CPU itself, which now performs CPU as well as NB functions.

Memory controllers have moved, naturally, from the Northbridge to the CPU as well, and were the first component to do so, followed by the rest of the bridge (ie PCIE controller)

Everything uses more pins to connect to everything else (except serial connections like SATA which uses less pins than PATA did). Pentium 4 used 478 pins to connect to its socket. i7 (Sandybridge E series) uses 2011 pads (pads have replaced pins).

Case designs are infinitely better thought out in every possible way. Power supply's on the bottom. Beige is completely gone from the world.

Multimonitor and 3D gaming (with glasses) are easily achieved.

Windows is now in version 7 (XP, Vista, 7) which is much less crappy than XP, which a lot of people still surprisingly use making it pretty much the most popular and widest install base version of Windows ever.

Everything is more affordable, though the quality on some things has slipped a bit, in others it hasn't.


and so on, and so on, and so on.
Click to expand...


Holy mother of god that was good. Props to you! :thup:

BTW, TV now has about 1000 channels, but there are so many ways to see things "on demand" via streaming or DVRs that watching TV in the order prescribed by someone else has become quaint. Cell phones are also probably more powerful than your last computer, Google is the source of almost all known information, and what it doesn't know...the Government does...so watch your back. ;)
 
I.M.O.G. said:
Home networking speeds though are much different than 8 years ago. Many were still using 10Mbit LAN connections but more were on 100Mbit probably, but no one hardly was using gigabit connections then I wouldn't imagine... And wireless was probably mostly 11mbps or maybe 54mbps, when now N networking is what anyone would want to buy.
Click to expand...

It's even more than that because a lot of people were using 10Megabit and 100Mbps hubs and now Gigabit switching is common in the home and 10G is not unheard of. Eight years ago 1.5 Mbps Internet connection often ran a corporate network and today people have 50Mbps screaming into their homes although 10Mbps is probably common.
 
Last edited:
Also forgot to mention that as optical media lays in its death throws, it has become freakishly cheap. Bluray drives are commonplace, and cheap, while DVD burners are about the price of dinner for 2 at McDonald's. Bluray uses a blue laser to read off the same size disc as a CD/DVD with many times more information. Blurays are multi-layered and come in a number of capacities. High definition movies come on Blu-Ray. There was also HD-DVD and a tiny BETA/VHS like war which HD-DVD quickly lost, leaving a lot of people stranded with HD-DVD players and 17 movies to watch, ever. That's not really computer related but it ties in.

FX4 said:
It's even more than that because a lot of people were using 10Migabit and 100Mbps hubs and now Gigabit switching is common in the home and 10G is not unheard of. Eight years ago 1.5 Mbps Internet connection often ran a corporate network and today people have 50Mbps screaming into their homes although 10Mbps is probably common.
Click to expand...

You can get 100Mbps in a lot of places now :bday:

Horrerblade said:
DANG nice job SO MUCH TYPING lol but very informational THANKS
Click to expand...

Maybe enough typing to get a blue status? :shrug: :rofl:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Vishera
Looking for an office chair for heavyset people.
Replies
5
Views
236
Nebulous
Nebulous
don256us
New week still #8.
2
Replies
20
Views
911
Holdolin
Holdolin
don256us
9 billion. 8 billion. 30 million. #8
Replies
6
Views
484
JLK03F150
JLK03F150
R
Motherboard for 13600k optimization/OC/Undervolting
2
Replies
33
Views
2K
Flamethrower1972
Flamethrower1972
Kenrou
This Amiga 500 was left outside for years. Let's try to revive it!
Replies
6
Views
244
Woomack
W
Back