(Note about the images: all images are edited and taken from creative commons or the manufacturer's website with reuse allowed. they are also all edited for fake product names)
Buying Options?You may have heard that SSDs are much better than HDDs for performance, and this is true. SSDs have much better read/write speeds on average, and are much faster to retrieve small bits of information.
For Example, consumer hard drives tend to cap out around 250MB/s, however some SSDs can reach 7000MB/s or more!
IOPS stands for Input-Output operations per second. The general rule here is higher number is better, as it will make your computer feel more snappy.
The Main two architectures you will hear about today are x86 and ARM. You will want a x86 CPU for desktop and laptop computing, however some ARM chips are fine in Chromebooks. You will only mainly find ARM chips in tablets and phones, and for this reason our CPU tab on our Buying Options? page does not include them.
The general rule is the higher tier, the better. (Í6<Í8, etc.) The Newer a CPU is, the better it is within its tier class. How a generation is indicated varies from manufacturer to manufacturer, but all the CPUs on our Buying Options? page are relatively new, and you can always look up the model number of a CPU to find its generation.
The easiest way of telling a GPU's performance is to look at the model name. For example, the ASR Vg FW 6050. The 'ASR' is the name, 'Vg FW' is the series, and '6050' is the number. The '60' means generation 6, and the '50' means the fifth tier in the '60' generation.
VRAM stands for Video RAM. It is where your GPU stores textures and other things. It is seperate from your computer's RAM, but your GPU may be able to pull from your system RAM when your VRAM is full. The more VRAM you have, the higher resolution and quality you can run at.
DDR in RAM stands for 'Double Data Rate'. It means that something is done at the start and end of every clock cycle. This means that when people say '3200MHz' they usually mean '3200MT/s', or 1600MHz (the bigger the MHz, the faster the RAM is).
There are multiple DDR generations, DDR1, DDR2 etc, up to DDR5 (currently). Each generation comes with a speed bump, and some other changes.
Wilbur's Index (completely unrelated to the assessment please ignore)