Educate me on system specifications - CNET Gaming laptops Forums

Answer Best answer as chosen by user qpruwoei

Computers 101

by r3vz - 11/24/11 11:31 PM

In Reply to: Educate me on system specifications by qpruwoei

I don't know if you already learnt this stuff yet, but its always good to get a newbie onboard, here we go.

Here is what a comp needs. CPU, RAM, Hard Disk and GPU (also referred as graphic card).

CPU is everything. It does its piece of work and directs every other component what is to be done. Its speed is measured in Hz. More speed the better. And more cores too means ability to do multiple things at the same time (for your understanding, a dual core CPU can be considered as two CPUs on a single chip)

And RAM. If CPU is your brain, you need some paper to do your calculations, don't you. This is what RAM is, CPU puts all the data it needs to work on in RAM. From here its accessible to every other components. It cant do any processing. Its just a temporary storage unit.

Alright, you do calculations, fine. But you need some book to get the data/formulas/procedures. This is what the hard disk is. Data is retrieved from hard disk and put onto RAM so that it can be modified or worked upon. Just like RAM it has no processing power, it is a permanent storage unit.

Question: Why use RAM, cant we do the same calculations on Hard Disk?
Ans : There may be a chance. But the CPU is so fast and Hard Disk is slow that its very inefficient to do so. Therefore we came up with RAM which has very high read/write speed.

Graphic Card helps you in see what is on the screen. You dont have to buy a seperate Graphic Card to use comp for normal purpose because the motherboard (which connects to all these components) comes up with a very basic one called video card. If you want high graphics or if you play games, then you have to go for a better graphic card.