Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
That is, they purchase commercially available motherboards, cases, power supplies, disk drives,
peripherals, and so on and assemble and market everything together as complete systems. Some
companies such as HP and Dell manufacture some of their own systems as well as assemble some
from industry-standard parts. In particular, the HP Pavilion and Dell Dimension lines are composed
largely of mainstream systems made with mostly industry-standard parts. PC makers using mostly
industry-standard parts also include high-end game system builders such as Alienware (owned by
Dell).
Note
There can be exceptions for all these systems; for example, some Dell Dimension XPS systems
use proprietary parts such as power supplies. I recommend avoiding such systems, due to
future upgrade and repair hassles.
Others using industry-standard components include Acer, CyberPower, Micro Express, and
Systemax, but hundreds more could be listed. In overall total volume, this ends up being the largest
segment of the PC marketplace today. What is interesting about white-box systems is that, with few
exceptions, you and I can purchase the same motherboards and other components that any of the
white-box manufacturers can (although we would probably pay more than they do because of the
volume discounts they receive). We can assemble a virtually identical white-box system from scratch
ourselves, but that is a story for Chapter 19 , Building or Upgrading Systems .
System Types
PCs can be broken down into many categories. I like to break them down in two ways: by the design
or width of the processor bus (often called the front side bus , [ FSB ]) as well as by the width of the
internal registers, which dictates the type of software that can be run.
When a processor reads data, the data moves into the processor via the processor's external data
connection. Traditionally, this connection has been a parallel bus; however, in newer chips it is a
serialized point-to-point link, transferring fewer bits at a time but at a much higher rate. Older designs
often had several components sharing the bus, whereas the newer point-to-point links are exclusively
between the processor and the chipset.
See Chapter 3 ' s section, “ Data I/O Bus ,” p. 42 .
Table 2.2 lists all the Intel and AMD x86 and x86-64 processors, their data bus widths, and their
internal register sizes.
Table 2.2. Intel and AMD x86 and x86-64 Processors and Their Data Bus/Register Widths
 
 
 
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