[f_n_v]

My Brother just bought a computer with a 3.2Ghz processor speed and a 800mhz bus speed, now when he downloaded a game on his computer it took a while- the same for other programs. Now I'm going to buy a computer also soon and I want a faster download speed from CD games/ software etc. Is it smart to get like a 2.5Ghz speed processor with a faster than 800mhz bus speed, to get faster download speed? Sorry if my question doesn't make any sense- limited computer knowledge. Thanks for your Help!

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As things stand today on relatively recent hardware standards, the CD-ROM is often the slowest device on the system after the floppy disk.

As a general rule, it doesn't matter how fast the actual processor speed is or what the bus speed is, as the limiting factor is always going to be how fast can the CD unit supply information that the computer is asking for. So therefore if the CD unit takes three seconds to start supplying data on a computer put together two weeks ago, it will still take three seconds on a computer put together 18 months ago.

It is possible to get newer style CD units that take advantage of higher transfer speeds, but again this is only a theoretical maximum as the physical units themselves are not able to spin that fast yet.

The actual speed of the processor is worked out by multiplying the bus speed by a multiplier, which is different for each processor model. So therefore a 3.2Ghz processor has a multiplier of 4 (800x4=3200). Regardless of this, as I stated above, transfer speeds from the CD unit to the hard drive bear no resembalance to the speed of the processor itself unless its being tied up doing something else that is resource-heavy (this will of course make copying from the CD slower). So under idle conditions, the speed of the drive transfer is as good as it gets.

[Neil Jones]

As things stand today on relatively recent hardware standards, the CD-ROM is often the slowest device on the system after the floppy disk.

As a general rule, it doesn't matter how fast the actual processor speed is or what the bus speed is, as the limiting factor is always going to be how fast can the CD unit supply information that the computer is asking for. So therefore if the CD unit takes three seconds to start supplying data on a computer put together two weeks ago, it will still take three seconds on a computer put together 18 months ago.

It is possible to get newer style CD units that take advantage of higher transfer speeds, but again this is only a theoretical maximum as the physical units themselves are not able to spin that fast yet.

The actual speed of the processor is worked out by multiplying the bus speed by a multiplier, which is different for each processor model. So therefore a 3.2Ghz processor has a multiplier of 4 (800x4=3200). Regardless of this, as I stated above, transfer speeds from the CD unit to the hard drive bear no resembalance to the speed of the processor itself unless its being tied up doing something else that is resource-heavy (this will of course make copying from the CD slower). So under idle conditions, the speed of the drive transfer is as good as it gets.

[f_n_v]

Thanks that makes sense!