Dangerous upgrades, be aware !!!

IT'S ALL CHANGE on the PC front during 2004, and practically everything that
defines a "new" computer is set to change over 12 months, with many
happening during the next six months.
A few things will stay the same, but mostly on the peripheral front. Let's
go through the list.

The two CPU manufacturers have some big changes afoot. Intel is about to
replace the current socket 478 with socket 775 – and that change should
happen in Q2. First we'll see the Prescott 478, then the Prescott 775. AMD
will also do the dance of the socket shift, moving from 754 and 940 pin
sockets to mostly 939 pin designs. Both companies will change processes from
130nm (nanometres) to 90nm.

In the middle of the year, the memory that current PCs use will also change.
The now venerable DDR will begin to fade away, with DDR-II replacing it.
With that change comes a new DIMM format, and new motherboards to plug them
into.

Motherboards will also have a total makeover. Intel is driving this move,
and the BTX form factor will come to dominate in no time. That will have
better cooling, better power distribution, better mounting, and probably a
bunch of things Intel hasn't told us about yet.

With the rise of new mobos will come new power supplies. Current [geddit?!?]
power supplies are called ATX, after the ATX mobos they plug into. With the
rise of 100+ watt CPUs, higher draw GPUs, lower voltage CPUs, and more
sensitive electronics, you need more carefully controlled power, delivered
in different ways. That means new power supplies.

With a new power supply and motherboard, you will also need a new case. The
BTX spec redefines airflow, and how things are placed around the computer,
and doing that is hard to accomplish without a new case design. So, shiny
new cases for shiny new parts, probably with new kinds of windows, new LED
placements, and new cold cathode colors. Be still, my beating heart.

To tie all this together, we will get PCI Express. PCI and AGP finally go
away, and it is about time. A more modern bus was long overdue, especially
for graphics cards. No one will miss the one way nature of AGP, and the
bandwidth restraints of PCI. When you see the size of a PCI-Express slot,
you will understand the word "change".

But there are a few things that won't change. USB 2.0 is pretty much set in
stone, as is Ethernet. You could call a slow move from 10/100 to Gigabit a
change, but that has been happening for a while now. The same is true for
drives. S-ATA is here, and it isn't set for a big change, but if S-ATA 2.0
sneaks in this year, you could call that a change.

Another half change will be for non-HD devices to move to S-ATA. Similarly,
SCSI will move from Ultra320 to SAS, but since SCSI is mainly a corporate
and server bus now, it won't affect a chunk of users.

While it is kind of a no brainer, all the cards you plug in will change,
mainly because the bus they plug into is going to be different. The cards
themselves will have, at least, evolutionary changes to support this
newfound bandwidth, and many will have a complete redo.

Graphics cards will undergo a makeover, with the NV40 and the R400 class
chips due in the spring. I feel kind of cheap mentioning a new line of
graphics cards as a change, it would be much more of a shock if there were
no new cards released. This is one change I will take though. Better
graphics is always a good thing.

While none of these changes seem all that monumental alone, how often do
things like this happen all at once? We probably will not see this many
changes in as short a time for many years to come. µ

"sigmun" wrote in message ...
IT'S ALL CHANGE on the PC front during 2004, and practically everything that
defines a "new" computer is set to change over 12 months, with many
happening during the next six months.
A few things will stay the same, but mostly on the peripheral front. Let's
go through the list.

...

While none of these changes seem all that monumental alone, how often do
things like this happen all at once? We probably will not see this many
changes in as short a time for many years to come. µ


You forgot one...

All the new hardware may come with new device drivers for Longhorn,
probably in Beta by years end.