Gaming Computers
What’s Important?
Gaming Computers are some of the most common PC’s in the computer industry. Saying that, it is very important to spend your money in certain areas to maximize performance.
The GPU is the heart of any gaming computer, it decides whether your gaming session is smooth or not . Many people have questions if they should use an Nvidia or AMD GPU. In most cases, AMD GPU’s provide better value in the budget section, and Nvidia GPU’s are primarily for the mid to high tier computers. For example, a budget computer will likely come equipped with either AMD’s integrated graphics, or a GPU such as the RX 580 that can comfortably play light eSports titles at 1080p which include games like Fortnite or Apex Legends. Mid tier computers will likely come included with an RTX 2060 or 3060, these GPU’s are most suitable for all games at 1080p to 1440p high settings. Finally moving onto the high end GPU’s, these include the RTX 3070, 2080ti, 3080 and 3090! These are best for 1440p to 4k gaming in the most demanding titles!
GPU’s are essentially a CPU, RAM and a PCB (Printed Circuit Board). The physical GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) as suggested, is the component of the graphics card that handles all the graphics processing. But how does it differ from a normal CPU? Graphics Processors are designed to handle a very specific subset of calculations that games and graphically intensive programs utilize (More specifically, GPU’s are highly optimized for floating point computations and can run a lot of them in parallel). CPU’s on the other hand are more flexible as they are designed to perform basic multiplication, addition, division and Subtraction.
For RAM, 8gb is the minimum for 1080p and 16Gb should be plenty for 1080p, 1440p and 4k Gaming. RAM or Memory is essentially an SSD on steroids, it is tremendously faster but comes in much smaller capacities, usually around 8Gb to 32Gb.
The CPU is the most underspent part in a gaming PC. Often times, gamers will get too caught up with the shiny new graphics card and spend too much on one. When looking for a CPU, 6 cores should be plenty for 1080p and 1440p gaming but when moving up the resolution to more demanding workloads with higher end GPU’s 8 cores is about right. Cores are physical individual processing units and the more cores you have, the more simultaneous tasks the processor can achieve at once. Yet, cores are not the full story, make sure to look at a CPU’s more in depth specifications such as IPC (Instructions per clock), GHz/clock speed rating (The physical operating speed of the chips on the CPU) and the amount of cache (Even faster RAM that is directly on the CPU die but is even smaller storage quantities so the CPU can access crucial data quickly). Looking at all these metrics will help prevent a bottleneck with your GPU as well as maximizing CPU performance for your use case and price point. This is when an underpowered CPU is working extra hard to keep up with the fast GPU.
Storage is a huge part of any gaming computer. What is the fun in deleting your most favorite games to download the new ones? Games nowadays have enormous file sizes. Red Dead Redemption 2 (awesome game by the way) alone is 150Gb! To ensure your PC is meeting these demands, I recommend having a hybrid storage system with both an SSD and hard drive. More specifically, a 1Tb SSD to store applications and your operating system and 2TB Hard Drive to store large games and any other programs, but this setup may vary depending on your price range. Before explaining how SSD’s function, it's important to look at how a hard drive works. A hard drive stores data on a set of magnetic spinning disks called platters, the “head” reads and writes data to the spinning platters. When a hard drive reads data, the platters will spin to the correct position so the head can read the magnetic code off of them. Since the mechanism is mechanical, it is often very slow when loading up programs since the platters might need to spin to various places to access the data needed. SSD’s are different because they don’t rely on moving parts but rather semiconductor chips that are enormously faster than their hard drive counterparts. SSD’s use flash memory to store, clear and rewrite data in chunks for a fast and efficient storage solution. The advantages to SSD’s is that they are faster than hard drives but usually come in smaller quantity sizes (most commonly 500Gb to 2Tb) and are generally more expensive than hard drives which makes them suitable for frequently opened applications. However, hard drives are cheaper for larger storage sizes but are cheaper and slower than SSDs which make them great for storing large applications.