Computer Components For Dummies

[Music] hello everybody and welcome to another youtube video so in today's video i'm gonna be giving you a pc component overview slash guide where i kind of walk you through the main components in a computer discuss what their purpose is how they work with the other components and then what you should look for when you're actually purchasing these components so whether you're buying a pc building a pc maybe purchasing a laptop it's really helpful to understand what each component is what the role is in the machine and what's actually going to make a difference in terms of your performance and day-to-day use of the computer so that's the goal of this video let's go ahead and get into it after quick word from our sponsor before we dive in i need to thank ltm designer for sponsoring this video ltm designer is the world's most trusted pcb design system that enables engineers to effortlessly connect with every facet of the electronics design process ltm designer has used 35 years of 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motherboard you're going to have a cpu that's your central processing unit you're going to have a ram which is random access memory you're going to have a graphics processing unit this may be a dedicated gpu so graphics processing unit or it may be integrated with your cpu you're then going to have some type of storage device so a hard drive or an ssd and then i just want to note here that any peripherals of things like a microphone a mouse a keyboard a monitor those are not a part of the actual computer those are things that are going to plug into the input or output devices of your motherboard and allow you to actually view what's happening on the computer so i just want to make that clear something like your monitor or your screen even if it's on a laptop that's not really a part of the actual computer the computer is simply the components that i just listed there may be a few other things depending on the build that you have but those are the main and kind of fundamental ones so with that said let's start going through each component i'll talk about the importance of them and which ones you really want to look out for when you're actually buying a computer and which ones are going to make the biggest difference for your day-to-day usage alright so let's begin with arguably one of the most important components which is the cpu now the cpu is the central processing unit and a lot of people like to think of this as the brains of the computer this is one of the most important parts it's speed is really going to dictate how fast your computer is and it's going to be responsible for doing all of the arithmetic all of the math and pretty much all of the heavy lifting of the computer now it's going to utilize all of the other components and it needs those other components to work properly but it is kind of the heart of the pc or the heart of the computer and with a poor cpu it doesn't matter what other components you have your computer is going to be slow so in terms of looking out for different cpus and kind of the properties of cpus you're going to have two main brands that you're going to be going to when you're purchasing a cpu or even purchasing a pre-built computer that comes with the cpu now that's going to be amd and intel now recently amd has been outperforming intel when it comes to value for cpus so personally i recommend amd cpus however intel does still have a large market share and tons of computers come with intel cpus it doesn't really matter if you have an intel vs amd cpu some are better at specific tasks but what you really want to look for when you're looking at a cpu is the specs of the cpu so the number of cores the speed of those cores and then the number of threads as well now when you're looking at a cpu i would say the minimum amount of cores that you really want to go with in 2021 is four now there is a lot of cpus that are dual core cpus you're going to see these in very entry-level machines very basic computers maybe even in things like phones now dual core cpus are fine if you're only doing something like web browsing or word processing but if you want to play any type of video game if you want to load multiple applications at the same time if you want a relatively snappy feel to your pc you're really going to want to go with at least four cores now when you're looking at cores you're probably also going to see something that says threats now typically the number of threads is going to be double the number of cores i don't want to get into that because this is kind of a video for beginners but essentially you don't really need to worry about the threads just look at the cores almost all modern cpus have something called hyper threading which kind of allows each core to perform multiple operations at a time that's why you'll see something like multiple threads or more threads than the number of cores now other than that you're going to see a speed for the core so if you see something like 3.8 gigahertz 4.2 gigahertz and then you'll see things like turbo clock boost clock all of these kind of marketing things you'll see on cpus right the speed of the cpu is very important but one thing to note is that just because a cpu has a higher speed does not mean that it's going to outperform one with a lower speed for example if i have a cpu that has six cores and you have one that has two cores but your cores are clocked at four gigahertz that's the speed of your cpu my cpu even if it's clocked at say 2.5 gigahertz is gonna outperform your cpu in almost every single task that core speed that you're seeing there is the speed of a single core so you can kind of multiply the speed by the number of cores and that will relatively tell you how quick the cpu is going to be now this is not a precise calculation and in some situations you do actually want a higher clock speed than the number of cores especially if you're running single threaded applications i'm not going to get into that again because this is for beginners but the idea is for most common people you're going to favor more cores over a higher clock speed and most modern cpus are going to be clocked at least 3 gigahertz which is going to be more than fast enough for you to have a very responsive and kind of fast experience using the computer alright so now let's talk about ram which is random access memory now ram is a temporary storage location now this means if you turn off your cpu anything in ram is going to disappear it's going to be gone now the point of ram is to store data that needs to be readily available to the cpu or the computer so it can very quickly be accessed and very quickly be changed so any programs that you're running on your computer will utilize a small amount of ram or if you're talking about something like google chrome a large amount of ram because they're going to be storing all of their program data in ram so it's very quick to access now this is in contrast to something like an ssd or a hard drive which is going to be a much slower storage medium but is going to be persistent meaning when you turn off the computer the data on there is going to stay it's not going to be deleted anyways let's talk about what you want to look for when you're looking for ram so ram has many different forums you have ddr2 ddr3 and ddr4 and one very important thing to note is that laptop ram is different than desktop ram so you cannot put laptop ram in your desktop that's not going to work so just keep that in mind i've know many people who have accidentally bought the wrong type of rep anyways the main kind of i guess types or generations of ram that we have right now is ddr3 and ddr4 now ddr3 is a much older style of ram that's probably a red flag if you're buying a computer if it has ddr3 you're gonna perfor prefer ddr4 sorry which has a much higher kind of stock speed now when we're looking at ram we have all kinds of speeds anywhere from something like two six six six megahertz uh to something like 3200 megahertz or 3600 megahertz now the ram speed doesn't matter a ton for most of you but if you are building your own computer then you want to go with a higher ram speed rather than a lower ram speed now ideally the sweet spot is probably going to be around 32 to 3 400 megahertz for your ram but for most of you you're not gonna have that option and you're not even gonna see that speed if you're buying a pre-built computer so in terms of the amount of ram for most of you you're going to want either 8 or 16 gigabytes of ram now you could get 4 gigabytes of ram if you're going with a very entry-level computer but just keep in mind that this is going to be an entry-level computer it's going to be slow it's not going to be the most performant so i would recommend as a minimum for most people unless you're really on a budget eight gigabytes of rent now 16 gigabytes is going to be the sweet spot this is a really nice middle ground you almost never need more than 16 gigabytes and again for most of you you're going to want that amount now some of you may be saying well can't i get 17 gigabytes the answer is no you need to have a certain denomination of ram it's gonna be a power of two so either two gigabytes four gigabytes eight sixteen thirty two sixty four one twenty eight that's just how ram works you'll see some weird computers that have like six gigabytes of ram don't worry about that that's kind of an exception to what i'm saying for most of you again you're gonna want either eight or 16 gigs now if you are doing anything that is going to require more ram you have a really high end cpu you're doing video editing maybe you're rendering a bunch of stuff then you may want to consider going up to 32 gigabytes of ram and if you're doing machine learning ai a ton of data processing and you need that loaded for your models you probably might want to go up to 64. now in my personal computer i have 64 gigabytes of ram i have never needed to use that amount the most i've probably ever used to be like 32 gigs and even that again like 32 gigs would be completely fine for my computer now one kind of random rule of thumb here that i'm going to throw in is that if you have a very high end gpu so something like a 30 90 a 3080 a titan then you're going to want to have double the amount of ram than your video memory now i'm going to talk about video memory in a second but if you have 24 gigabytes of vram you're going to want at least 48 gigabytes of ram which means you should probably go to 64. i won't talk about all the reasons for that but just keep that in mind in case you're getting a very high-end gpu so now let's move on to motherboard now the motherboard is going to be the bridge or the connection between all your different pc components so your graphics card your cpu your ram all of that is going to go directly on the motherboard and the way they're going to communicate is through the bus on the motherboard now the motherboard is also going to deliver power to the components unless the components have a their own separate kind of power connection anyways the motherboard is important but for most of you you're not going to have to pick it out or even look at the specs because it's just going to come with whatever computer you buy if you are building your own computer do some research i'm not going to talk about a ton in this video it is very important that you pick a motherboard that's compatible with your cpu your amount of ram and all of the expansion cards you may want to add and other features like fan headers uh and like extra usb ports and stuff like that now your motherboard will also have the input and output devices so it will have usb ports on it it will have audio jacks it might have an hdmi or vga port if you have an integrated graphics card all of this type of stuff uh anyways that's pretty much it for motherboard again not super important don't worry about it unless you are building your own computer in which case do some research all right so let's go to gpu which is graphics processing unit now this is very important if you are doing anything graphics intensive like 3d rendering video editing playing video games if that's the case you're going to want to get something known as a dedicated gpu however if you are not doing any of that then you can get an integrated gpu now an integrated gpu is built into the cpu which means you don't have to buy a separate component it's just already there now you do require either an integrated or a dedicated gpu to get a display output and the reason i'm saying that is because some cpus do not come with integrated graphics so most amd cpus do not have integrated graphics meaning you actually need a graphics card to get some output from the computer however most intel cpus do which means that you can just directly plug in a cable to the motherboard and you'll be able to actually see something on your monitor okay hopefully that makes sense now i don't want to go through all the different gpu models because there's so many and there's a lot of great reviews out there from people other than me but when you are buying a computer the first thing you want to consider is do i need a gpu or do i not need a gpu then you're gonna look at the different levels of gpus and depending on what you're doing and the specs of your other components you're gonna pick a gpu now you want your gpu to be balanced with your cpu amount of ram and all of that type of stuff don't go buy a 39 d if you have a 4 core cpu that's unnecessary and you're going to bottleneck this crazy gpu with a very poor cpu relative to the performance of the gpu alright so i was just editing this video and i realized i missed some important details in the gpu section so i just wanted to kind of fill those in here now i don't want to give you a treat though if you've stuck around until this point in the video and i'm going to show you that this is my cat this is fresca she's hanging out on the desk right here she's like always on my desk when i'm working which is nice but also quite annoying if i'm trying to type or something like that anyways i just wanted to introduce her in case you guys haven't seen her kind of walking around on the desk in my videos regardless let's now get into those missing details so gpus when you're looking at a dedicated gpu that's kind of what i'm going to be talking about now you're going to have two companies that are going to be providing the gpus amd and nvidia now nvidia is kind of the preferred company for gpus that's the one i personally recommend just because they're more mainstream they have like larger market share and uh their drivers and all these things are more compatible with more stuff they have some other cool features like nvidia broadcast which you can only get access to if you have specific uh series gpus from nvidia now also if i'm mispronouncing that let me know in the comments because i never know how to pronounce that company name anyways let's continue all right so amd totally fine if you get an amd gpu that's all right in fact most mac computers are going to come with an amd gpu and that's because i think they have some special like proprietary partnership regardless those are fine now when you're looking at the specs of a gpu the first thing you're going to want to look at is the generation of the gpu so is it first gen second gen third gen is it a 20 series is a 30 series you just want to look at how recent it is and obviously you're going to want to go for the most recent gpu that you can now other than that you're going to want to look at the amount of video memory now video memory otherwise known as vram is special dedicated memory very similar to regular ram but just for the graphics card now the graphics card is actually going to be responsible for rendering all of your frames so if you're playing a video game your video memory is going to act as a video buffer and what that means is you're going to have all of your frames and everything that you're going to be seeing kind of being stored in the vram first and then being passed to the display output where you'll actually see it on the screen now again take all this with a grain of salt it's just an over simplification to give you a general kind of explanation of what's going on but essentially the more video memory the better now as i said before you want to have double the ram of your video memory so if you have an 8 gig video memory card you want 16 gigabytes of ram this is just so you can load uh the vram of the gpu fast enough if you don't have enough ram then it's going to go slower it's not going to load as fast as it possibly can okay so in terms of the amount of vram you want the minimum you're probably gonna get is four now in some gpus there will be two gigabytes of ram that's pretty unnecessary at that point you don't even really need a dedicated gpu but in any gpu that is actually gonna do anything meaningful for you it's probably gonna have four gigabytes of ram now four gigabytes is nice to have if you're not going to be doing any super high res gaming or high settings gaming maybe you just want to do a little light video editing you want like some graphics power that's where you would go with four gigabytes but the sweet spot is gonna be six eight or 12 gigabytes now for most people you're gonna be getting a card that has six or eight gigabytes in it as soon as you start going up to 12 or 24 gigabytes you're getting into the really expensive high-end graphics cards and at that point i probably don't need to tell you what to buy you probably already know what you're looking for anyways those are kind of the details i wanted to add in again i would prefer an nvidia gpu especially if you're gonna be gaming however if you're just doing some light video editing you could definitely go with the lower end gpu like an amd gpu that has four gigabytes of video memory now it's also very important again to look at the generation the older gen the gpu obviously the worse it's going to perform and the less features it's going to have the new high-end gpus have a ton of awesome features that most modern games will take advantage of say like ray tracing if you go with say a 10 series nvidia gpu you're not gonna have those features so keep that in mind you definitely need to do more research on this before you buy a gpu but hopefully that gave you a few more details because before i felt like i was lacking all right so with that said i think i'm about ready to end this kind of you know random insertion into the video i will also mention that if you're buying a dedicated gpu and you're building your own computer consider your power supply because the high-end gpus require a lot of power sometimes up to say 300 watts so you want to make sure your power supply has the headroom to actually support that again you need to do more research on that if you're actually going to be building a computer all right now we can move on all right so now let's talk about persistent storage devices ssds and hard drives let me start with hard drives so a hard drive is actually a physical spinning magnetic disk that has a read and write head that is able to read magnetic charges off the disk that means that first of all if you bring a magnet near your hard drive you will erase all of the data because it is magnetically charged it also means it is a lot slower than a solid-state drive because you actually physically need to read um magnetic bits right from the hard drive now i won't get into all of the kind of mechanical aspects of it but the thing is this is actually mechanical you have moving parts which means it's more prone to failure but the one advantage of hard drives is they are a lot cheaper and they have a huge storage capacity so what i usually recommend people do is get one single hard drive as kind of their data drive where they store things like files images videos stuff that they're not loading frequently because if you're loading stuff like your operating system from a hard drive it's going to be very very slow all right so lastly we will end off with ssds now an ssd is a solid state drive it's a very fast storage medium much faster than a hard drive but is much more expensive and has lower capacity so what i will say here just to kind of give you the quick notes because i'm not going to go through all of the differences between them is that if you are buying a computer make sure if it has one drive it's an ssd it doesn't really matter what the ssd is any ssd is going to be relatively fast and if you're building your own computer you can do some research you need to make sure the ssd is going to be compatible and all of that type of stuff now if you're worried about the amount of capacity that is in your ssd maybe it's only 256 gigabytes and you think you're going to have more files than that that's fine still get the ssd load your operating system on the ssd load your main programs on the ssd anything that you want to run quickly then put all of your files things like videos photos whatever on the hard drive anything that you don't want to access a lot where that is kind of just sitting there it's literally just storage put it on a hard drive anything that you use frequently like applications programs put it on your ssd because when you want to load something you first need to read it from the ssd it then gets loaded in ram and then it starts running so if you're experiencing long load times check if your programs are on an ssd or a hard drive if it's on a hard drive that's probably the reason and if you have your operating system on a hard drive i feel very sorry for you because your load times are probably 10 times longer than they need to be if you had the operating system on an ssd now i could keep going here for hours but i do need to end the video here hopefully this was helpful and gave you kind of a decent introduction to computer components maybe got you thinking about some of the specs you haven't seen before helped you understand some different things and how they work i could keep going on about this for hours and hours and i'm sure i missed some important things in this video if you guys think i missed something please leave a comment down below i will try to address it if you want more videos on computer hardware then definitely let me know and i will make those in the future with that said make sure to check out programmingexpert.io tim if you want to learn to code and i will see you in another youtube video [Music]

Channel: Tech With Tim

Views: 125,058

Keywords: tech with tim, computer components for dummies, computer components, computer parts, basic computer parts, how to build a computer, what are the best computer parts, CPU, GPU, RAM, Motherboard, central processing unit, graphics processing unit, random access memory, hard drives, solid state drives, ssd, computer storage, tech with tims computer, computer specs, what is a good computer, computer parts guide, graphics cards, what is the best graphics card, DDR4 ram, sodimm ram

Id: cZs6kh0WFRY

Length: 20min 27sec (1227 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 10 2021