What is THE bottleneck of modern multimedia PC?

[theplanb]

I'd say, hard disk drive. We need somthing better... or get rid of it all together and replace with static ram.. that would be the day..
Instant on, and blazing loading speed.. mmmmm..

 

[cbuchach]

It really depends on the type of application you are running. Since you specified multimedia PC I will start there. The bottleneck when playing games and trying to get a higher framerate will either be the video card or the processor and memory. During gameplay the hard drive is comparatively infrequently accessed.

If you are looking at distributed computing stuff, then the processor might be considered the bottleneck.

 

[mk52]

and when you turn your machine off - all your data will go down the drain

 

[Hard_Boiled]

But in general the hard drive is the slowest component in a system that you use regularly. I would not count cdroms or floppy drives as slower than hard drives, because floppy drives are ancient and cdroms can't really spin that much faster and read all cd's. Just look at how quickly video cards and cpu's gain speed and MHz. Every half year we have a new and improved video card, sporting faster DDR memory. The race between AMD and Intel has given us cpu's at almost 2 GHz. I thought I was hot stuff last summer when I overclocked my P3 850 to over 1 GHz.

Hard drives though, they get better all the time but most are still spinning at 7200 RPM. Just given the design of hard drives and how they are built and what they are supposed to do, they can't advance as quickly. I think every day the hard drive becomes an even bigger bottleneck.

 

[Schlocemus]

I can't wait until Optical Drives

 

[dowxp]

hard drives. systems would be overall faster if they were rated in ns instead of ms. and scsi isnt fast enough.