Have you ever wondered what actually makes your computer work? The home personal computer is made up of various components that work together for a single purpose. Before deciding to upgrade or change your computer in any way, it is a good idea to understand better what each of the components are.
Motherboard
The motherboard is what connects all of the different components inside your computer so they can work together. The reason why you can put a DVD in your computer DVD drive, hear sound out of your speakers, and watch the DVD on your computer monitor is because of the motherboard. The motherboard is a circuit board that houses your computer’s memory, processor, graphics and sound cards, modem, and so on. Each component inside your computer is somehow tied to the motherboard.
Motherboards fit into specific computer cases, though there are some standard sizes of motherboards and cases. If you buy a Dell computer, for example, but want to change the case to another case, you may run into trouble if the motherboard is designed to fit only Dell cases.
Processor
Your processor chip is the brains behind your computer. The faster your computer processor, the more processes it can handle, thus increasing the overall performance of your computer. You can easily see the difference that various processors make by comparing the time it takes to boot-up a computer using a processor running at 700 MHz, for example, and a 2.5 GHz speed processor.
Processor speed is measured in hertz, which is the equivalent to cycles per second. One megahertz (MHz) is one million hertz while one gigahertz (GHz) is one billion hertz. The top single core processor speeds on the consumer market today are close to 3.8 GHz. The faster a processor is, the more heat it produces. Processor heat is part of the reason why there are cooling systems (e.g., fans) inside computers.
Upgrading processors can be expensive and difficult. A large part of what drives the cost of mainstream computers is the price of the processors. If you want to upgrade your processor, you need to make sure your motherboard can handle the newer processor. You can check with your computer manufacturer to see what types of processors your motherboard can handle.
The two main competitors in the processor market are AMD and Intel. Depending on who you talk to, you’ll hear that one is better than the other. For the average personal home computer, a processor from either company will do. For the average home user, the processor speed is what matters most. Compare the GHz rating between chips to determine which processor best fits your budget.
Processor speed isn’t all that matters, however, if you plan on playing high-end games or doing some heavy multimedia video editing (more than just home movies). Processors are named using various numbers and letters, all of which mean something. I won’t get into the differences here, but both AMD and Intel have various classes of chips they offer. Intel, for example, reserves the Pentium name for its more expensive, higher end processors. Intel Celeron chips, which are lower-end, cheaper processors, may have the same clock speed (in GHz) as Pentium chips, but the Pentium chips have a few more processing features that make the chips perform overall “better” than Celeron chips. For the computer user who browses the Internet, edits digital photos, and makes simple home movie DVDs, the Celeron chip should do just fine.
Within the next year or two, dual core processors will become more mainstream than the current single core processors. Dual core processors, because they are in effect two-in-one processors operate at slower clock speeds than the top single-core processors. I’ll save a lengthier discussion of single versus dual core processors for another time.