Frontside bus explained

Q. My computer is nearly four years old. I've been looking at new computers on the Internet, and I'm confused. What is an 800 MHz frontside bus, for heaven's sake?

A. I like terms that make sense. "Steering wheel," for instance. That's easy to grasp. "Frontside bus" sounds like the Main Street Express. Obviously, it's not. The frontside bus is the circuitry between the microprocessor and the main memory. The faster the frontside bus, the more data is delivered to the microprocessor. Intel and Advanced Micro Devices have worked to increase bus speeds as their chips have grown faster and faster. ("Bus" is believed to derive from the electrical engineering term "bus bar." A bus bar is used to distribute electrical current.) To further confuse things, the frontside bus doesn't actually run at 800 megahertz. It runs at 200 megahertz. But it has four channels, which deliver the same amount of data as an 800-megahertz bus. The previously fastest bus, 533 MHz, had four channels running at 133 MHz. There are other buses within the computer: PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect), which hooks up the internal components; AGP(Accelerated Graphics Port), a direct connection between the graphics system and the main memory; and backside bus, the connection between the microprocessor and level 2 cache (memory that speeds up the microprocessor's work). There are more buses, but you get the idea. Your question, of course, is, "What does 800 MHz frontside bus mean to me?" If you are a serious gamer, you might need the extra power. The same goes for computer-assisted design, which is very demanding. But most of us do some word processing, lots of surfing, and maybe some casual game playing. We store photos and send e-mail to friends and family. So, for the majority of people, the answer to your question is, "Not much." Hardware long ago outstripped the demands of software. This is heresy among the geeks, but here's my advice: Don't worry about the frontside bus. Don't worry about memory speeds. Don't worry about whether the hard drive cache is 8 MB or 2 MB. These things probably won't be significant for the average user. Get an Intel Pentium 4 microprocessor, or the AMD equivalent. For instance, an AMD Athlon XP 2400+ is approximately equivalent to an Intel Pentium 4 2.4 GHz. Buy a minimum of 256 MB of RAM. Better yet, get 512 MB. If you do a lot of video work, spring for a gigantic hard drive. Otherwise, a 40 GB hard drive should be OK. It's easy to get twisted up in computer numbers and specs. But the average computer user just doesn't need to worry about them.