Feeling a bit in over your head on your next desktop purchase? We offer up basic tips for buying a desktop PC that’s right for your needs in 2010.
Whether you’re looking for a high-performance gaming rig or a humble business machine to type up expense reports, buying a new desktop PC can be one of the most confusing purchases you’ll have to make. Between processors, hard drives, memory, and video cards – not to mention choosing what it should look like – computing buying can often seem like an endless set of compromises. In some ways, it is, but finding the middle ground that’s right for you and your wallet isn’t as tough as you would think. Here’s a quick rundown on the basics of every component you’ll look for in a new PC, and what you should look for.
Size
Most desktop buyers don’t find the physical size of a desktop nearly as important as they do when buying a laptop, but you’ll still need to give it some thought. Your most basic choices can be broken down into towers, small-form-factor PCs, nettops, and all-in-ones. Towers vary widely in size and can be considered the most basic choice for most buyers. Although they take up more room, they’re also cheap, easy to work on, and have plenty of room for expansion. Dropping down to a small-form-factor PC may be preferable if you want a PC for the living room or somewhere else it will be on display, but you’ll sacrifice all of the above factors to some degree, too. Nettops can practically fit in the palm of the hand, but they typically use laptop hardware, limiting expandability to solely what you can plug into external ports. An all-in-one PC looks a bit like an oversized monitor, packing everything into one easily movable unit. Although they’re typically clean and easy to set up, they also lack expandability, and since the monitor is tied to the PC, you’ll have to buy a new one if you ever upgrade.
Processor
The most important part of your computer can also be one of the most difficult to choose. Between Intel and AMD, models lines including Pentium, Core 2 Duo, Athlon, Sempron, and more, GHz ratings that aren’t comparable between companies, things start to look pretty complicated. PCWorld offers one of the most comprehensive guides on the subject, but let’s look at just the basics.
For most users, two is the magic number for cores. Two cores will offer excellent multitasking capability, and because they’ve become a de facto standard for new PCs, they’re reasonably affordable, too. Three or four cores will obviously offer more performance – especially for processor-intense applications like video editing – but most users simply won’t take advantage of all the extra horsepower.
Clock speeds (ex. 3.2GHz) are still an important indicator of CPU performance, but can only really be compared within similar lines. A 2.0GHz Intel Atom processor is faster than 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, but not necessarily faster than a 1.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. Other factors include front-side bus speed, onboard cache, whether it’s a 32- or 64-bit processor, and many more. Check out PCWorld’s guide if you really want to understand how they all interact to make up performance.
As with many aspects of PC buying, you generally get what you pay for, so let price be a rough guide to processors when the tangle of naming schemes and specs proves to be a little bit too much, and do research on the individual processor you’re considering buying to get a better idea how it will perform with what you intend to use it for.
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