A friend of mine for instance bought a new PC recently with a hard drive that had not the advertised size. While that can be easily discovered there are components that make the identification process much harder. Think of processors for instance.

The recent news that a major US online hardware store sold fake Intel cpus indicates that everyone should make sure that the hardware purchased is the hardware delivered.

The Windows device manager is usually a good starting point but the information presented there are limited. It is usually better to use a third party program to identify computer hardware.

The Intel Processor Identification Utility has been created by Intel to provide owners of Intel processors with a tool to check if their cpu is the one that they have ordered.

The tool displays the information about the Intel processor in three tabs that are called Frequency Test, CPU Technologies and CPUID Data.

The frequency test will display the reported and expected frequencies of the processor. Small variations do not necessarily mean that the processor is fake.

CPU Technologies lists the supported technologies of the CPU while the CPUID Data tab displays in depths information about the CPU.

The Intel Processor Identification Utility can be downloaded directly from Intel. A version for Microsoft Windows PCs and a bootable version are provided on the Intel website.

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.

24 drives equals a total storage of 6 Terabytes. The other system specs are as impressive. They added a combination of two Intel 3.2GHz QX9775 Quad-Core cpus, two ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 cards, 4GB of 800MHz FB-DIMM DDR2 SDRAM, two Corsair HX1000W power supply units, an Adaptec 5 Series RAID card, an Areca 1680ix-24 RAID card and of course the 24 256GB MLC Solid State Drives.

How fast was the system after all? They managed to top 2 Gigabytes of sequential write and reading speed. They performed some tests like loading all Microsoft Office applications (in 0.5 seconds), all 53 apps of the Windows start menu (in 18.09 seconds), copying a 700 Megabyte DVD rip (0.8 seconds) or recycling 700 files with a total size of 5.6 Gigabytes (instantly).

The viral marketing campaign is highly successful with more than 250K views on Youtube already. Can you imaging running a system like this? What are your thoughts, let us know!

While it will not provide benchmarks of any kind it will display the hard facts about the chosen Intel products. The comparison chart is aimed at experienced computer users who understand abbreviations such as FSB, GHz or L2.

Casual users might feel overwhelmed by the technical slang that is used on the website. The interesting aspect of the comparison website is that it contains hundreds of Intel products. The desktop processors products alone contain old and new Intel desktop processors starting with Intel Pentium 4 Processors to Intel Core2 Quad Processors and Intel Core2 Extreme Processors.

Selected products are displayed in a handy comparison chart that lists all the selected products and their specifications. Desktop processor information include information about front side bus speed, L2 and L3 cache, clock speed, chipsets, slot / socket type, memory type and architecture.

It is possible to select a different display language in a pulldown menu. The consequence is limited choice of products. Since most information are usually English anyway it does not make much sense to switch languages.