The power of the CPU
A really good friend of mine posed a question recently. He was in the process of planning to build a PC for his in-laws…folks who are very much your “average computer user”, and his question – his first thought in planning the new PC was what CPU he should go with.
I’ve said it before, that I think the CPU should actually be one of the last things you spec on a PC. I wrote that over a year ago, and I believe it is even more true today. Obviously other component choices would depend on what CPU you choose – especially when deciding on “AMD vs. Intel”, however I still feel that other components such as enclosure, optical drives, hard drives, graphics cards, etc. should all take precedence over the CPU.
Just today I was reading an article on the performance of Intel’s new Core i3 530 CPU. Now this is very much a mid-line CPU, and I really got to thinking – this thing isn’t THAT Much slower than some of the higher end chips, especially considering that Anand got it up to a cool 4GHz it’s stock cooler w/ just a very minor voltage injection.
I used to be a real hardware junky – I read sites such as Anand’s and I kept up with all of the latest CPU’s – they were the big thing – they were what made a PC. Nowadays, a good SSD will make far more difference than ANY CPU would in general use. The only real areas where CPU speed is of supreme importance is in digital content creation such as Video, Music and 3D rendering and to some extent to Gaming, however the latter is also far more influenced by GPU speed. I still say for a cool 90% of computer users, any currently sold, modern CPU will serve them and their computing needs as well as any other.
What are your thoughts? Are CPU’s getting boring? They sure aren’t the star of the show like they used to be – that’s for sure!
