J4CKT said:
Kaiser - could you elaborate as the part grades? you referring to simply more expensive higher end parts that are used in the pcs or something else? as i havent heard of this before.
Sure. All parts have metrics of course. So take a hard drive. Of course they are made to human exacting standards, but that is just it. Human standards that are never perfect due to one reason or another when it comes to extremely small parts or anything for that matter. Yes, they may be designed by a computer or manufactured by a computer, but who created the computer that is doing the engineering and the manufacturing in the first place? Humans, yes. Let alone raw materials themselves are not all equal. Your part is only as good as its weakest component. What happens with a drive is they do a burn in and take metrics during that procedure. Specs like armature speed, motor speed, seek speed, peak operating temperature, constant operating temperature, etc. are recorded. Once this is done, lets consider they all go into a database. So if a manufacturer makes 500 hard drives, all of them are entered into the database. Of course there are a few throw aways so lets say that now they are down to 470 drives all together that meet the MINIMUM operating tolerances for that particular product line. At that point the database is parsed for lets say the top 100 performing hard drives out of the 470 taking into consideration, but not limited to the specs listed above. They would be shipped out of the manufacturer as Grade or Class A hard drives. Then lets say they take the next 200 as Grade or Class B, then the final 170 as Grade or Class C. Grade A components when ordering from any of tghe major manufacturers get put into their workstations and business class computers. Sometimes the lower of the business class gets grade B, such as Dell Vostro. But never will business class machines get grade C components. So take Dell for instance; Dell Optiplex and Precision workstations get all grade A components. Dell will only put Class C parts in a home computer like Dimension or Inspiron, where they usually will get a grade B component. So, all things considered, let take one of the specs that are metered and work with that for a second. We will take constant operating temperature. Now if you have all grade A components, the whole computer will run much cooler and therefor faster when you are really a power user. When you put grade B parts together, you can imagine that since there are a bunch of components that have the ability to create heat, your overall temperature of the computer raises exponentially. This not only slows a computer but greatly depreciates its lifespan of each component. In simplest form, lets compare graphics cards. We all know that for gaming one of the fastest cards is created by the manufacturer BFG. Now, why if they have the same exact chipsets, do they outperform something like an eVGA brand? Notice the price difference in BFG also. This is because they purchase a class A chipset from nVidia and they run cooler than class B. Following this engineering priciple, this allows BFG to overclock higher than most of the rest as well because of heat transfer. Remember the speed at which bits transfer is directly related to the heat that is created during the transfer.
Now, I see that there are a bunch of HP lovers here. I like HP also, BUT when you get into grade A components, the price of an HP goes up through the roof. If you want to take a look, go to HPs website and check out the business class machines which you CANNOT for the most part buy in a store. These are the boxes with the grade A components. This is the model line that I compare to Dell's business class and for the most part, Dell's prices are hundreds cheaper for the same class. If you want to try something, build a business class, look at the price, then build a home class with the same components and compare the price. Why is the price more? Well, it certainly isn't because of the case that the components are housed in. It is because of the higher price they pay for grade A parts. Of course this excludes any competitive sales on business class as apposed to none on home class and business volume purchases.
Also, along with this, there is another portion of business class that tends to be faster. Not all of the time, but a good amount of the time. Lets take intermediate bit transfer speeds. Things like FSB (front side bus). Faster speeds via FSB can make a processor seem like a whole different speed. throw a Xeon on an 1066Mhz FSB, then the same Xeon on a 1333Mhz bus and the 1333 screams compared to the 1066. Because within that small amount of speed difference, you pull exponentially, not just 25% faster off of the chip and hence your calculations are rendered faster. These are where major bottle necks are created. As with only being as dependable as your weakest link, computers are only as fast and the speed of their worst bottleneck.
A third consideration is that in the higher end business class, not the lower end business class, they tend to add redundancy and error checking such as ECC memory, but that is all for another discussion.
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