More Ghz good thing or bad

[Smartmike]

I all ways wondered if having more Ghz in your cpu is a good thing or a bad. What is it?

 

[seanyo]

yo

Front Side Bus, RAM, CPU, GPU... u want these running as high you can get... overclocking can be dangerous though... if something has a nano-second variable, less is better... u want terahz

 

[Blind Dragon]

It's a good thing, but more important to be stable. Meaning if you adjust the clocks up you can get crashes and if you start increasing the voltages to achieve higher clocks you can damage the hardware.

If your system is stable, yes the higher the better. I am always amazed when somebody overclocks everything in their box then comes on here and post that they have a blue screen

 

[Justin]

It depends entirely on context. "2GHz" or "1333MHz" or any other clock speed given is just a reference, and not an indicator of performance. The terms aren't always directly related to how fast a particularly component actually is, either. For instance, "DDR2-667" actually operates at around 333MHz.

To really answer that question, you'd need to know what hardware you are referring to and what hardware you are comparing it to.

 

[DelJo63]

The combination of BUS speed + CACHE size will limit the effect CPU speed.
As even the cpu instructions get fetched from disk, the cpu can starve for
instructions when it processed the instruction stream faster than the BUS+CACHE can keep up.

 

[Blind Dragon]

Good point joe. That was the other point I thought of posting. A lot of times you can see just as good, if not better, performance gains by reducing latency (waiting) rather than just simply increasing output.

I look at it like this -> Hypertransport Technology is a good example, picture a tunnel with cars driving through it back and forth, but they have to share lanes, so one car has to wait for another car to move before it can advance. If you increase the speed limit that's not going to do much good if the cars have still have to wait for a car to move before they can go. (The cars are bits of data if you didn't figure it). With hypertransport the cars have dedicated lanes for incoming traffic and lanes for outgoing traffic(it sends data on both the rising and falling edges of the clock signal). This decreases the wait times (latency), now increasing the speed limit will have a better effect without the waiting.

 

[Smartmike]

Thanks very good examples

 

[Grafficks]

Years ago, Intel envisioned CPUs running at 12GHz by the end of the decade.
But now, we realize that new processors will sacrifice clock speed for core count.

CPU's can no longer be judged by clock speed. Power supplies can no longer be judged by wattage. Video cards can no longer be judged entirely by amount of memory.
These days, you can no longer just look at one hardware spec when selecting parts. New technologies are emerging that require the consumer to be more knowledgeable of different specs in order to pick the ideal component.