When it comes to choosing a computer from a store, or building one on your own, there are a LOT of different models, parts, stats and jargon to parse through. If you aren’t used to looking at all of the information, it’s easy to get a little lost and not know where to begin. The good news is that, in general, there are four main parts of your computer that are critical to determining how it will perform, and that you are likely to see information for listed on the label of a pre-built computer or laptop. How important each of these is to your needs is determined by what software you use and how, but these still give you a good idea of what you are looking at.

There are a few other components that control how much power the system gets and how efficiently it gets it, making sure parts stay cool enough to have a long life, determining how much ability you will have to upgrade your system down the road, and of course how it looks on the outside. There are also the peripherals- keyboards, mice, monitors, and maybe even VR headsets.

But before we dive into those peripherals in a later article, it’s time to run down the first of the four key pieces of hardware, and what they do.

Central Processing Unit (CPU or Processor)

This is often referred to as the brain of the computer, it’s where the math happens that is in the background when you are writing a word document or fighting spiders in Minecraft. There are two mainstream manufacturers of CPUs for consumer computers, Intel and AMD. Each manufacturer has a lineup of half a dozen or a dozen primary models per year, and for each CPU model there are two main numbers to make note of: the number of Cores, and the speed (shown in GHz).

CPU CORE COUNT

Back in the late 90s or early 2000s occasionally a really high end computer would come out that actually had multiple CPU chips in it. It was almost always for workstation or server uses, because software would need to be written to take advantage of more than one CPU acting at once, and it wasn’t common for consumer software to be written that way. In the years since, Operating systems like Windows have gotten to a point where they can take advantage of more than once CPU, even if the software you use can’t, because the Operating System can, essentially, use each CPU for a different software title, allowing you to multitask more efficiently.  

Now having multiple CPUs has essentially become the standard, except instead of having 2 CPUs on a motherboard, you have a single CPU chip, with the chip containing 4, 6, 8, 16, 32 or even 64 CPU cores inside the single chip. This is the CPU’s Core count. Some software is still only designed to work on a single core, sometimes out of necessity, but other software has been written now to take advantage of using multiple cores. For instance, AutoCAD and other Drafting and 3D modeling software only uses a single core the vast majority of the time because of how it works on a mathematical level, while Photoshop can see advantages to using as many as EIGHT cores at once. Plus, as I mentioned, multitasking is generally helped by having multiple cores, to a point. All of this makes the type of work you do really affect the value of additional cores.

CPU SPEED

The second CPU stat, the speed of a processor, is measured by the number of power cycles moving through your processor a second, measured in GHz (Gigahertz), or how many Bllion clock cycles happen each second. Each of those cycles is a set, or part of a set, of instructions, so on a basic level a higher GHz number means more math, or more things, can get done by a single CPU Core. When this number is combined with a core count, that means that each core does, on its own, that number of GHz.

You will sometimes now see the speed given as two numbers, like “3.6 GHz, 4.2 GHz boost” which means that your processor cores should all be able to run at 3.6 GHz all the time, but sometimes your processor will be able to speed up one or maybe several cores to 4.2 GHz for short bursts. If you are running software that is single-core optimized, and you don’t do a lot of multi-tasking, the speed may be the more important of the two numbers.

INTEGRATED GRAPHICS

As an added twist, some processors will also have Integrated Graphics, meaning that they can draw the images that make the feed you see on your monitors. This has trade-offs, as it uses processor power and also RAM, so it cannot be used by software, and it’s limited in its power compared to a standalone graphics card. For designers, artists, and gamers, integrated graphics may not be powerful enough for everyday use, and you may want to put your money into a better processor without integrated graphics and a separate graphics card.

MANUFACTURERS

In terms of Intel vs AMD, your choice between them will determine what type of motherboard you can get if you are building your own computer, and will affect somewhat what Memory you want to buy, but none of the other components are affected. There also is a slight difference in that AMD currently can perform slightly more instructions per cycle than Intel, so an AMD chip with a slightly lower clock speed might actually be slightly faster than an Intel chip.

CONCLUSION

All that means that for most people, something with between 4 and 6 cores, and around 3.5 GHz for a desktop, or 2 to 4 cores with a speed of 1.5 to 2 GHz for a laptop, where low power usage and less heat is important, is a good starting point. If you do a lot of multitasking or use programs like Photoshop, looking for not only more speed but also more cores will get you better performance, to a point. Photoshop will do great using up to 8 cores, and if you use Photoshop while doing a lot of multitasking, it MAY make sense to look for 8 cores. However going for 12 or 16 cores if all you’re using is Photoshop is not only overspending, it also potentially hurts your performance, as more cores means slightly slower speed per core, so unless you are doing video editing or 3D rendering there isn’t really a reason to move to that next class or beyond.

The CPU, if you are building from scratch, generally should cost somewhere 10-20% of the total cost of your desktop tower if you are building one from scratch, more if you are using integrated graphics and no graphics card.

Next time in Part 2 we’ll go through the second key component, Memory.

If you have a question about any of the information I’ve given, or about something I haven’t addressed, let me know in the comments below or on my About page, and I’ll try to answer your question, or I may even turn it into more content- There are things I may not realize I need to talk about until you tell me. Thanks!