Hello, everyone! I’ve been doing some research into computer hardware lately, and one thing that I keep coming across is this idea that the speed of a processor, while important, isn’t the only thing that affects a computer’s overall performance. I’m having a bit of a hard time wrapping my head around this because I always thought that a faster processor meant a faster computer. Can anyone explain why this isn’t necessarily the case? I’m really interested to learn more about this!
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The processor is one of the most important parts of a computer, but there are a number of other components that also make up a complete computer. Depending upon what you are trying to do, the speed of these other components can also be important to a computer’s overall performance.
If the program you are using loads or handles a lot of data, or needs to constantly load and write data, the performance of the drive(s) that the data is loaded from or written to is very important. If your program is very graphics-oriented (such as a game,) a faster video card may be a bigger boost. If the program requires a lot of memory to operate (to keep large amounts of data in memory while manipulating it, etc.) more RAM may be needed.
It is not unusual for your CPU to be idle a lot of the time while it is waiting for other components to complete their task. A faster CPU will not help if the bottleneck is that the computer is loading data from a low-speed platter drive or if it does not have enough memory to keep everything in the main memory while running a very large program.
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