What is the most important factor in purchasing a computer>

Welcome back to another edition of ask PC 911. Today we’ve got a great question. We’ve been doing a couple of series of shows on choosing a laptop and desktop. Basically making a purchase of the computer and today’s question is going to address that as well. Question for today is: What is the most important factor in purchasing a computer, be it a laptop or a desktop? Good question, let’s answer that.

The most important factor is going to be the CPU

CPU is a central processing unit. It’s basically the engine of the computer processor. That’s the simple most important part, because of couple of things:

  • You’re not going to upgrade your CPU. It’s not like a changeable item as in like the hard drive you can upgrade typically. RAM and similar you could upgrade. But your CPU is just not feasible. You want to start with a good engine, a good fast engine. And then maybe you can work from there. So making that choice today more than ever is more and more complicated. Many processors used to be what was called the speed, the megahertz and back in the day when you have a single core processor. You look at the megahertz and the faster megahertz pretty much gave you a faster processor. Now that has changed. Now the processors have multi-cores. Let’s say before they used to be a single lane highway. Today it’s a multilane highway. So you can have a multicore. It’s an 8 core processor running I would say 2.5 GHz is going to be faster. It’s basically accomplishing more processing, then let’s say a Dual core 3 MHz.  If you really care dont look at the megahertz anymore.
  • Then we go into, luckily there are only two brands of processor, for the most part, you have AMD and you have Intel, but within them, sometimes a lot of people ask for which you like better, but within them they have slow processors and fast processors, so you can’t just name out Intel is the best, well Intel what, compared to what, so that gets a little complicated as well.
  • Then sometimes you can narrow down and say, well core series is the current series and if I go with an I3 or an I5 or an I7, I’m good to go, well even in the I3 there are slow and faster and the I5 slow and faster and here we are talking about really making a purchase, we’re talking about looking at three or four computers or what have you and if you have three or four computers and all three of them have an I3, which one is faster, you want to break it down to the model number, but still that possess a question, which one is going to be faster, so to answer that, probably your head is spinning now, but we’re going to answer that very simply, I’m going to give you a website which you to go to and you’re going to put in the model of the processor that you are looking at, you are comparing three computers, you’re going to look at their processor, you are going to input that there, I’d recommend really doing it online, you’re not to probably do it in the store, that’s how I do it, I shop online, I take a look at my best buy target whatever the case may be, I see what they’re offering and then I’ll take a look at the benchmark that’s going to help me decide which one is better, it’s pretty simple.

CPU Benchmark

The website is called CPUbenchmark.net, there is a search feature, you’re going to put in your processor, let’s say an A6-5200 and it’s going to give you back the benchmark score, forget about what it means, this is a number, you know 700 is better than 600, 1000 is better than 700 etc. 5000 is better than 4000, simple as that.

So you take a look at three computers, you’re imputing the different processors and you’re getting their number, all other things being equal, the one with the highest number is going to be the fastest one, so that’s pretty much a no-brainer, you don’t have to worry about all the intricacies, for example.

If I was taking a look at an AMD and an Intel, I would pull up the benchmark. For example; an i5 is going to be faster than i3.an i7 is going to be faster than i5, but when we’re going to compare an Intel that will be an i5, let’s say to AMD, it’s very difficult to compare, so you break it down back to the benchmark, I get an i3, I look it up, it gives me a benchmark of 2000, 2200, I put up an AMD, it gives me a benchmark of 3500, I’m going with the 3500, you know all other things being equal.

So that’s your answer for the day, the single most important part of the computer is the processor, the CPU and you got a link right here to be able to look that baby up and really break it down to which one is the best, see you in the next video.

Another popular question is: What brand computer is best? Tune in and see what we advise!