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@ 2009/05/01Today we are going to benchmark inexpensive home multimedia systems that are not designed for active gaming. What's a typical portrait of such a system? We'll try to recreate it from scratch.
What typical tasks does a home computer perform, if it's not used for gaming or runs them very seldom? It's usually web surfing, email, and editing documents. But these tasks don't need a high speed computer, any modern system can cope with them. Quite possibly watching movies (or even encoding/transcoding video). This tasks does not require a top computer, but the slowest processors won't cope with it either. Besides, you will need a capacious hard drive: a movie in high resolution may take up several gigabytes. It makes sense to add a DVD recorder to the system -- it will come in handy for a media library. Perhaps our hypothetic user will also want to process photos from time to time. Hence: CPU, hard drive, DVD recorder. By the way, what about memory? Considering how much it costs now and how much of it new operating systems from Microsoft need (Vista and future Windows 7), we'd say that even a home computer should have 4 GB. It's less than $50 after all.
What typical tasks does a home computer perform, if it's not used for gaming or runs them very seldom? It's usually web surfing, email, and editing documents. But these tasks don't need a high speed computer, any modern system can cope with them. Quite possibly watching movies (or even encoding/transcoding video). This tasks does not require a top computer, but the slowest processors won't cope with it either. Besides, you will need a capacious hard drive: a movie in high resolution may take up several gigabytes. It makes sense to add a DVD recorder to the system -- it will come in handy for a media library. Perhaps our hypothetic user will also want to process photos from time to time. Hence: CPU, hard drive, DVD recorder. By the way, what about memory? Considering how much it costs now and how much of it new operating systems from Microsoft need (Vista and future Windows 7), we'd say that even a home computer should have 4 GB. It's less than $50 after all.
