What does 8X mean when you are purchasing a computer?

Answer 1

Good question. It can mean a variety of things.

It could be referring to the speed of a CD or DVD drive, meaning how much faster than the original industry standard the drive spins.

Examples might be 16X read, 6X rewrite, 8X write.

It can also in the same manner refer to an AGP slots speed (4X AGP, 8X AGP)

if it appears as X8, it's likely referring to the number of channels of the PCIe slots. the most common PCIe slots are X1, X8 and X16.

Those are the most common uses, but without an actual context, I cannot say what YOUR 8X means.

For instance, if it's an ad that says "costs 8X less than a MAC" then obviously the meaning is different.