curious about processors, motherboard, and hard drive.

[jack99999]

first off, what is the point in having six cores? will it actually make a pc faster? can fewer cores be better in some cases?


second, i've read that there are motherboards who's bioses cannot be altered via the operation system. where do you find such motherboards and do they have a specific name?

and finally, when should a reliable 120 gig solid state drive cost less than $100?

 

[RHochstenbach]

first off, what is the point in having six cores? will it actually make a pc faster? can fewer cores be better in some cases?

With multiple cores it can perform multiple operations at once at full speed. But an application needs to be programmed to be able to use those cores. In most cases, a quad-core CPU is more than enough.

second, i've read that there are motherboards who's bioses cannot be altered via the operation system. where do you find such motherboards and do they have a specific name?

The BIOS can't be altered by the operating system, unless you use a specific utility from the motherboard manufacturer. The sucessor of BIOS which is called EFI can be altered by the operating system, but at this moment this is only available on Apple hardware and on some motherboards.

and finally, when should a reliable 120 gig solid state drive cost less than $100?

The price of a solid state drive is still quite high, but the performance is really noticeable. If you can afford an SSD drive, I would suggest to buy it. Drives up to 256 GB are quite affordable at the moment, but the ones starting from 512 GB are expensive. OCZ has some nice drives, which have great performance.