ACPI – Advanced Configuration and Power Interface. An open standard allowing the operating system to manage power usage in the PC and its devices according to need. The ACPI standard allowed system builders to take power management responsibilities away from legacy firmware technologies.
AGP – Standing for Accelerated Graphics Port, AGP is a type of expansion slot on the motherboard for graphics cards, which boasted faster data rates than the PCI standard but has since been superceded by PCI Express (PCIe).
ATA - An interface standard used by storage devices such as HDDs and floppy disk drives. It stands for “AT Attachment” (originally the AT part stood for ‘Advanced Technology).
ATAPI – An interface standard and descendant of ATA. Whereas ATA was only designed to work with HDDs and other similar devices, ATAPI extended functionality to other types of device including the CD-ROM, DVD player and high capacity Zip drives.
Air cooling - Air cooling is a method of remove the excess heat from the case of a computer, usually with fans placed on the cast itself or attached to components themselves, e.g. CPU or GPU. Air cooling is commonly used as an inexpensive way of dissipating heat (almost all desktop PCs will have at least one fan on the PSU to exhaust warm air from the case. Overclocked systems tend to rely on more efficient methods of keeping vital components cool, such as water cooling and phase-change cooling.
BIOS – Basic Input/Output System. The BIOS is firmware built into all PCs which is run when the computer is first switched on, allowing the device to be booted and identifying and initialising the devices in the PC, including the keyboard, mouse, graphics card and hard disks.
Bit – A bit is the smallest unit of information possible on a PC, with a binary value of either 1 or 0. In popular computing architectures, eight bits make a byte.
Bluetooth - Bluetooth is a proprietary wireless technology for transmitting data over short distances. It is often used to wirelessly couple one electronic device with another where it is not practical or desirable to use wires, such as a headset or mobile phone. Bluetooth technology relies on using shortwave radio in the band 2400-2480 MHz.
Blu-ray – An optical storage disc with significantly higher capacity and data transfer rates than CDs and DVDs. Blu-ray discs are available with capacities of up to 128GB with a standard read rate of 36Mbits/second – over three times as fast as its predecessor the DVD. Sony’s Blu-ray was the format that emerged victorious from the HD Optical Disc War, overcoming the competing HD DVD format from Toshiba.
Boot / Boot Up - To start or restart a computer. When a computer is loading the operating system it is said to be ‘booting up’.
Byte - A unit of data equal to 8 bits.
Cache – A cache is a block of memory reserved for temporary functions. The information held in the cache is there so that it can be retrieved again quickly. A cache might exist in various types of hardware and software, such as a CPU or an internet browser.
Clock speed – The rate of operations per second of a computing component (usually the CPU, but also the GPU, RAM etc). The clock rate or speed is measured in hertz and is determined by a crystal oscillator.
Cluster – In terms of HDDs, a cluster is the smallest amount of space that can be used to store a file on a disk. The cluster itself can be a different size depending on the disk and how it has been set up. A disk with large clusters may not be an efficient storage space for small file sizes due to the space wasted on each cluster.
CMOS – Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor. A technology used to make the integrated circuits used in integrated chips. In more general usage it refers to the battery powered chip that operates the persistent system clock on a computer.
Coolant – The fluid that is used in a liquid cooling system. This is normally water, with additives to inhibit the growth of vegetation in the system (warm water held in a loop can sometimes be prone to algae) and corrosion-inhibitors to prevent the metallic parts of your cooling system from breaking down.
CPU – Frequently referred to as simply the processor, the CPU (Central Processing Unit) is the part of the computer that does all the calculations and number crunching necessary for computer programs. The more powerful the processor, largely determined by the number of transistors packed on to the chip, the faster your machine will be able to perform tasks such as gaming and media processing. The most popular brands of CPU for desktop PCs are made by Intel and AMD, whereas the mobile market is dominated by ARM chips.
DDR SDRAM – Double Data Rate Synchronous Dynamic Random Access Memory. DDR SDRAM and its later versions, DDR2 and DDR3 is a class of memory with high data rates and 64-bit data paths.
DIMM – Dual Inline Memory Module. A format of RAM that superceded SIMM and a 64-bit data path rather than the 32-bit path of SIMM RAM.
Driver - A driver is a piece of software that allows a device (such as a graphics card or printer) to interface with the computer. The use of a driver means that each application (or operating system) does not need to know the precise details or specification of the device; the driver’s job is effectively to translate instructions between the computer to and from the device.
DVD – Digital Versatile Disc. An optical disc format which replaced the Compact Disc (CD) due to the much larger volumes of data it can store, with capacities up to 17GB possible (although rare) but with 8.7GB more common. DVDs also have much higher transfer rates than CDs, with a standard read/write rate of 10.5Mbits per second. DVDs are still in common usage although they have now been surpassed in capacity by Blu-ray discs.
Gigabyte – A gigabyte (GB) is a unit of storage equal to 1,024 megabytes (MB).
GPU – The GPU (Graphical Processing Unit) is a chip dedicated to computer graphics, handling them more effectively than all-purpose CPUs. The GPU can either be integrated into the motherboard, present on a discrete graphics card (e.g. ATI Radeon HD6950) or in the case of the newest CPU designs, integrated into the main CPU. High performance machines will feature at least one dedicated graphics card, and more often than not there will be two graphics cards to share the graphics processing load of high demand applications.
Hard Drive – The hard drive (or hard disk) is the primary storage device for a PC and is where all your programs and associated files are kept. Modern hard disks can be accessed exceptionally quickly, often spinning at 7200RPM, and although not as fast as RAM, data stored on a hard drive remains once the machine has been powered down as it is recorded magnetically. The capacity of hard drives has drastically increased over the years, and where 250MB was a typical size in the 1990s, we are now commonly seeing drives with capacities in excess of 1TB.
IDE - The first version of the ATA / ATAPI drive interface standard developed by Western Digital, it was designed to connect hard disk drives to their associated computers. The acronym stands for ‘Integrated Drive Electronics’.
Ivy Bridge – The codename for an Intel CPU architecture using 22nm technology and incorporating Intel’s 3D or Tri-gate transistor system. It is the successor to Intel’s Sandy Bridge range of processors and will offer performance hikes of around 20 percent over the 32nm Sandy Bridge design.
Kilobyte – A kilobyte (KB) is a unit of storage equal to 1024 bytes.
Loop – In the world of water cooling, a loop is a single, self-contained water cooling system. Some systems might use more than one water cooling system in combination, so might have a double or triple loop system. Multiple loops can be used to lighten the load on the cooling systems radiator.
Megabyte – A megabyte (MB) is a unit of storage equal to 1024 kilobytes (KB).
Motherboard – If the CPU is the heart of a computer then the motherboard is its skeleton. The motherboard is a printed circuit board (PCB) on which the other components, such as CPU, graphics cards and memory all sit. As well as incorporating integrated GPUs etc, most motherboards include their own heatsinks and fan mounts to help dissipate heat. Popular motherboard manufacturers used by Palicomp include Gigabyte and ASUS.
Overclocking – This is the process of making a processor run at a faster clock speed than originally intended. The advantage of overclocking is that you can effectively gain access to a computer with a processor faster than what is commercially available. Overclocking will make a processor run hotter than it would otherwise, so a cooling strategy must be in place to cope with the extra heat to ensure the CPU remains safe and stable. Despite the precise tolerances used in manufacture, every chip is different and the amount of overclocking a CPU can handle varies from chip to chip. Processors operating on a commercially available clock speed are actually operating well within their limits to ensure their reliability and performance. Some chips can perform massively better than others, but a commercial overclocker such as Palicomp will seek to find that sweet spot between reliability and performance, rather than pushing a chip to its limit and potentially reducing its lifespan significantly or affecting operating stability.
Phase-change cooling – Phase-change cooling is an effective, though not as yet not very widely used method of lowering CPU temperatures that uses the cooling properties of vapour compression and evaporation. Gas is compressed and condensed into a liqud, which is then passed through an expansion valve to evaporate, producing temperatures as low as -150c. Phase-change systems are still expensive so are not commonly used on overclocked desktops.
PSU – A Power Supply Unit (PSU) converts 240V AC mains electricity to a low-voltage DC power supply suitable for computer components, e.g. 12V.
RAM – Random-access memory (RAM) is generally used interchangeably with a system’s main memory and is the place where programs and information in current use by the computer are stored. As opposed to a hard disk, where the data is stored long-term, data in RAM is only help temporarily and is lost once the computer is switched off. Adding more RAM to a machine will help you run multiple programs at once; trying to run several applications at once when you are low on RAM can lead to major slowdown, even though the CPU is not overly taxed.
ROM – Read-only memory. This is memory that cannot be written to and can only be read. Rather than working memory such as RAM, any memory designated ROM is used for storage, e.g. CD-ROM.
Sandy Bridge – The codename for Intel range of 32nm processors which were first released in January 2011. Intel describe the Sandy Bridge processors as the second generation of its popular Core processor range. The 22nm die shrink of Sandy Bridge has the codename Ivy Bridge.
Terabyte – A terabyte (TB) is a unit of storage equal to 1,024 gigabytes (GB).
USB – Universal Serial Bus. The most common standard of Plug and Play port, USB is a ‘hot plugging’ interface that emerged in the mid 90s and allows a multitude of devices to be easily connected to each other. There are different versions of USB, with the most recent at the time of writing being USB 3.0, which allows for transmission speeds of up to 625MB/second (approximately 10 times as fast as USB 2.0′s 60MB/second.
Water cooling – This is a popular method of dissipating heat from overclocked and high performance computer systems. Water is able to cool components more quickly and effectively than air, meaning it has largely supplanted this form of cooling in higher spec systems. In this kind of cooling system, water is pumped around the inside of case to the areas where cooling is required, taking heat away from the CPU, GPU and other critical components.
Wi-Fi -
