64bit Checker is one of the easiest tools available for that, providing that the computer is already running a version of the Windows operating system.

Before we take a closer look we should quickly point out why it may be important to know if the cpu of the computer is 64-bit compatible.

The main reason for finding out is to know if a 64-bit operating system can be installed on the PC. If the cpu supports 64-bit then it is possible, if not then only a 32-bit operating system can be installed.

64bit Checker is a portable application, which means that it can be executed without installation. The software lists the relevant information directly in its main window after execution.

The program lists the operating system name, version and edition. PC users who wonder whether they have a 32-bit or 64-bit copy of Windows installed find the information right in the program window.

The processor listing however details if the processor is compatible with 64-bit systems, or not. The bit checker offers several reporting options, which are probably overkill for such a small application. Information can be exported to the clipboard or saved as text or HTML reports.

64bit Checker is a free portable software for Windows that detects if a 32-bit or 64-bit version of Windows is installed, and whether the cpu supports 64-bit operating system.s The program is available for download at the developer site over at Igor Ware. Check out Windows 7 32-bit vs 64-bit for more information about the differences between 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows.

The PC that I want to build for instance has to be an all purpose PC. It should be able to run the latest games but it will mostly be used for work. The PC should be as silent as possible without running to hot. The operating system will be Windows 7 64-bit. It should support USB 3.0 which has been released some time ago and will become the new standard to connect USB devices.

I have decided to divide the article into different parts to be able to concentrate on specific hardware and why I have chosen them. We begin with the selection of the CPU, motherboard and RAM, the core components of a computer.

Build Your Own PC: CPU

PC users have a wide selection of CPUs. It basically comes down to the two manufacturers AMD and Intel who both produce processors for lots of different purposes. We are looking for a desktop cpu which means that we will concentrate our search on those. Top of the line CPUs are usually to expensive for their performance gain over the rest of the CPU lineup (unless you have the cash lying around).

This basically leaves two options: An Intel Core-i7, Core-i5 or an AMD Phenom II X4. It is now time to use the Internet or computer magazines to find benchmarks and reviews of those CPUs. You can use many hardware shops like Newegg, CPU Benchmarks or Tomshardware as well as many other sites for that.

You will end up with a few CPUs that would make a good selection: Intel Core i7-860, Intel Core i7-920, Intel Core i5-750 or AMD Phenom II X4 965 BE. The final selection now is not only determined by the performance but also the price and quality of the CPU. The AMD CPU is cheaper than all Intel CPUs. It’s performance is lower than the Intel CPU performance but it should be sufficient for all computing tasks.

The Intel Core i7-860 is the fastest Intel CPU in this field but also the most expensive one, we are talking about a difference of €100 here.

• My Selection: Intel Core i7-860
• Alternative: AMD Phenom II X4 965 BE

Build Your Own PC: Motherboard

The selected CPU leads directly to the motherboard that we need. The Intel Core i7-860 needs an LGA-1156 CPU socket type  motherboard. We use our needs and wishes that we came up with earlier in this step. The motherboard needs to offer all the connectors that we need, e.g. Firewire, which makes the selection process easier for us as we need to find and evaluate only those motherboards that support all the features that we need.

What should the motherboard offer?

• Minimum number of memory slots: 4
• CPU: At least Intel Core i7-860
• Memory: At least DDR3 1600
• USB 3.0
• Onboard Lan: 1000/100/10
• Onboard Sounds: Indifferent
• Onboard Video: No
• SLI: No
• SATA 3 GB/s: At least six
• Raid: No
• Other Connectors: Not needed

This may obviously look different when you build your own PC. It is again important to make an initial selection of 2-3 motherboards that offer what you are looking for. The next step is very important. Perform a search for that motherboard on the Internet and add keywords like problem, error, or help to it. Take a look at those posts and the number of them to see how likely it is that you might run into troubles.

The Gigabyte GA-P55-USB3 is one of the few motherboards that support USB 3.0 right now. It is not as expensive as many other  motherboards that offer USB 3.0 (costs $120).  The other motherboards that I have taken a look at are the  MSI P55-GD85 which retails for about $220 which has a surprisingly similar configuration to the Gigabyte motherboard and the ASUS P7H57D-V EVO for $200 which is the only one of the three with an HDMI port.

The Gigabyte GA-P55-USB3 offers everything that I need plus it is roughly $100 cheaper than the rest of the motherboards. That’s enough to make it my pick in the motherboard category.

My Selection:

• GIGABYTE GA-P55-USB3

Build Your Own PC: RAM

The selection of the motherboard determines the RAM – or computer memory – that we can use. We also need to determine at this point if we want more than 4 Gigabytes of RAM. We would need a 64-bit operating system if we do.

We do need DDR3 RAM (to be precise 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM)  as this is the computer memory supported by our motherboard. We also need dual-channel or quad-channel and not triple-channel RAM as we have selected the Core i7-860 cpu. This means that we either need to shop for 4 Gigabytes of RAM or a factor of that (8, 12 or 16 which is the maximum supported by the motherboard).

It does not really make sense to buy less than 4 Gigabytes as it would limit the PC”s performance. Avid gamers or those that run applications that need as fast RAM as they can get might want to take a look at overclocked RAM or RAM that can be overclocked nicely. I usually stay away from that RAM though as the performance gains usually do not justify the price increase. The motherboard supports up to DDR3-2200.

My Selection

• CORSAIR XMS3 8GB (4 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 ($270)
• G.SKILL Trident 8GB (4 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 2000 (if you want faster) ($290)

This was the first part of the Build your own PC February edition. I hope you enjoyed this as much as I do. Leave a comment if you have questions or suggestions.

Real Temp displays various information about the cpu. The information are not limited to the cpu temperatures but also the model of the cpu, clock speeds and cpu load.

The main purpose of Real Temp is however cpu temperature monitoring. The temperatures of each cpu core are displayed in columns in the program’s interface. They are divided into various sections that display the maximum and minimum temperatures as well as the current cpu temperature.

The time that the maximum and minimum temperature levels were reached are also displayed in the program which is great for troubleshooting purposes. Many advanced settings are available that can change the information that are displayed, integrate external applications such as RivaTuner or settings that define how and where the application is displayed.

The CPU temperature monitor Real Temp uses less than one Megabyte of computer memory when running minimized in the system tray. Computer users with Intel cpus might want to give the software program a try.

The process manager displays a list of processes currently running on the system. By default hidden processes are hidden but they can easily be revealed in the interface. A right-click provides several possibilities to interact with the process. It is possible to open the program directory, perform a Google search, to set the priority of the process, look at its properties and create a rule for it.

The rules are basically permanent changes to the process. Everyone can set a process priority in the task manager but those priorities are reset when the process is killed. With rules users can make those changes permanent as long as the process manager is running in the background.

Even more interesting is the fact that you can set process priorities for visible and minimized applications and set a cpu core affinity and that each instance of the process should be distributed to different cores. Another interesting aspect are the special actions. Those can be defined if a process is started, ended or idle. Actions include to launch another application, to restart the process, to kill it or to show a tooltip.

Core Temp concentrates on the cpu, the central processing unit of the computer. It can read the temperature of several cores if the cpu is a multi-core cpu. While this is not a unique feature Core Temp does its best to display the temperatures in the best possible way. The software provides an easy interface that displays all information in one screen.

One great feature for overclockers and new PCs is the logging feature that logs the temperature of the CPU and its cores so that it becomes easy to analyse the temperature changes over time. I still prefer to use Speedfan because it provides additional information that are important to me. If you just want to analyse and check the cpu you are best of with Core Temp though.

Another reason might me memory usage. Core Temp uses a third of the memory that Speedfan uses when running. (3MB compared to 9MB).

Once when messing with command-line features a bit, I found out that a simple 1-line code can bring my CPU to 100% load in a second for as long as I want. If I really wanted to test the reliability of my CPU fan or water cooling system, I would run this tiny code for pretty long time like a few hours to make my CPU sweat a bit. Now to that simple code – bring up the Run window by pressing Win+R and start command line by putting cmd in it. Here comes that simple loop:

for /L %i in (1,1,#) do help
(replace the # with a number determining how many loops will be executed and also how much time it’ll take to finish the task, depending on your CPU’s performance)

Pretty simple, huh? It does nothing else than to repeat displaying command-line’s built-in help which should raise (according to my multiple tests) every single-core CPU load to 100% and maintain it at that level for the time the script is executed. That’s all folks !

Config Inspector is a nice little freeware application for windows operating systems that could be described as an advanced task manager. Besides offering more information about loaded applications and processes it also displays vital information about memory and cpu usage, network utilization and general windows information.

A nice handy utility which is only 125K zipped. Just unpack and run, no installation required.

ConfigInspector: The Next Generation of Windows Task Manager

For the average user, Windows Task Manager probably doesn’t come into play very much at all, though this is just a guess. Users who are more particular and curious from moderate to advanced abilities are definitely familiar with Task Manager. It is a go-to for controlling application usage, active process identification, observation of services and performance and CPU usage among other things. From the Task Manager, the user is able to terminate processes and applications that are unnecessary or interfering with other applications.

ConfigInspector is a free utility that displays the most pertinent information about your operating system. It is like Task Manager on steroids. For the user who utilizes Windows Task Manager regularly, this is a must-have utility. It is more precise than Task Manager and offers more features, yet you still have the control that you normally would, if not more. The specific features that it offers, as per the specs, are as follows:

Displays list of working applications;
Displays list of working processes;
Monitors the memory status;
Monitors the CPU and network utilization;
Displays the full list of CPU capabilities;
Displays important Windows OS parameters;
Displays Windows Network parameters;
Displays HDD status and information;
Displays videocard information;
Displays soundcard information;
ConfigInspector works under Windows 2000/XP/2003 only.

The last part is interesting. “ConfigInspector works under Windows 2000/ XP/2003 only. It works under Windows 7 as well. Perhaps that is because many XP applications are compatible with Windows 7. There is no mention of Vista compatibility at the download site. To examine the capabilities of ConfigInspector, download the .zip free version from this link.

Double-click the .exe file to extract and ConfigInspector opens immediately without any installation. It is a stand-alone utility that can be turned on and off as needed, though it would be reasonable to assume that the advanced user would use it on a regular basis and perhaps leave Windows Task Manager aside.
For example, here is a screenshot of the CPU usage monitor:

There is a constant and indelibly accurate readout of CPU Load and Kernel Usage. Load is indicated by the green line and Kernel is indicated by the red. You will see rapid and continuous fluctuations every second. This CPU is running 12 applications at once, so it is interesting to see the activity.

Specific activity can be identified with ConfigInspector for Applications, Processes, CPU Usage, Memory, Network Utilization, CPU, Windows, Machine, Display, Media, Network and IDE/Drives. All of these are tabs in the utility and each can be appropriately manipulated as needed. The following screenshot shows the Memory tab:

It is visible, right down to the exact number of bytes, how the memory is allocated. This is definitely a pristine diagnostic tool. As stated, the PC used in the demonstration is running 12 applications so there is a great deal of activity and only 16% of the Physical Memory is free at the time of the screenshot.

Much can be ascertained and controlled with this utility and it is certainly worth taking for a test drive. In terms of memory, it only occupies 125KB, so there is nothing to lose – just much to see.

But that’s of course not all, they also discuss some interesting aspects of history including a look at dual core cpus, the amd code name troubles and energy efficiency by performance per watt. The only negative aspect I can find is that they don´t give a recommendation for various user types, which means that the average user will have troubles finding out which cpu would be best suited for him. But normally the average user is not reading articles about cpu charts either, so, take a look and if you find it useful I´am more than happy.

If you are interested head over to Tomshardware

The website has changed significantly in past years. The easiest way to access all processor charts that have been released over the years is to visit this page. Here you find processor listings and how they perform in popular benchmarks such as 3DMark 11 or 3DMark Vantage.

You can click on the menu that is displayed below each listing to select a different benchmark result that you would like to take a look at.

You can alternatively load the Articles > CPU listing to read up on the latest developments. One of the latest articles at the time of writing is for instance looking at the best gaming cpus for the money of January 2012.