So you're in the market for a new computer
huh well whether you want to build one or buy one and whether you have a really good idea of what you
Specifically want or you have no idea
This video aims to help pretty much
Everyone by going over what things you should look for when building a PC and looking for parts or buying an entire
PC pre-built right off the shelf because both are valid
Options depending on what you're going for and you probably already know what you want to do
So I'm not gonna try to convince you to do one or the other
Let's get into what you should actually look for in that computer itself
But there's also other stuff that aren't really related directly
to the physical part of the computer stuff like the
warranty and all that then we can talk about later now the first thing you need to look at clearly is the
CPU it's the brain of the computer
But what most people look at is whether it's like an i7 or I 5 or an
I3 and they just happen oh well
I 7 is the best type of CPU or even if you're looking at AMD
there's the rise and 7 rise in 5 and rise in 3 kind of
Corresponding to Intel's but a lot of people don't really consider that well
it's not just AI 7 or I 5 as if they're the same exact CPU because
Not only are there different years of
I7s but there are also different models of each CPU within each year's i7 line
So you can't just say oh well this has an i7 and that's gonna be equal to all others
You're gonna want to look at which I 7 that is specifically and compare that on Intel or if it's a rise in seven on
Ambe's website and see how that stacks up
against the other
CPUs in that line and maybe you don't know a lot about the individual little specs of the CPU
but you can at least get an idea of where that CPU stands and whether it's
justifying a high price
Compared to maybe another computer right next to it on the shelf that costs five hundred dollars less
And it's just one step down so that's something you want to look at the CPU
Specifically the model of CPU really look into that and don't just say oh
Well - i7 it must be the best
Next has to do with RAM and we're not just gonna talk about the amount and we're not even gonna just talk about the frequency
But we will talk about the amount first so
Obviously four gigabytes is probably the absolute
Bare bare minimum you would want in a computer I would recommend this day and age
You'd want at least eight gigabytes of RAM and that will pretty much cover anyone's typical usage
but if you're gonna be using I don't know a high-end gaming or
You want to do video editing or something a little bit more than standard use I would say if you can
Bump it up to twelve or sixteen gigabytes
And if you need 32 gigabytes you would definitely know it so anything above 16 is probably overkill
Unless you have a specific reason for that now as for frequency
Yes
That is something you need to look at but a lot of people forget about another very very
Important equally important actually spec which is the latency of the RAM they go hand-in-hand?
Frequency and latency because you can have a very high frequency
But that also means that you're going to have a higher latency and a lot of times these may actually
Cancel each other out now rather than try to explain the relation between latency and frequency and spending the whole video on it
I'll put a link to another video on my old channel Theo geotech when I was only doing real videos on that channel
where I talked about what latency is and how it relates to frequency and
everything you need to know because it is actually something that is very essential and will save you money because
Most people have no idea what latency is and it is just important as
Frequency, and if you don't know what latency is then you could be spending more money on something that is not better so I highly
Recommend watching that video I'll put the link in the description to that as well
But I will say the gist of it is that if you go for high frequency all the time you're probably going to be overpaying
Because that's what people think is worth more money
They're gonna be paying more money and the manufacturers charge more
But you could probably save a lot more money by going with lower frequency and lower latency Ram
and Get just as much performance for cheaper all right now the next thing you need to look at this is kind of obvious
most of you already know this but I thought I'd throw that in there is
You need to look at the version of the operating system
I would hope that you know whether you're buying a PC with Windows or a Mac
But I don't know I'm not gonna assume anything, but obviously there are different editions of Windows there's Pro
There's home if you don't know what the difference between home and pro is I would just get home
You wouldn't really use pro
But the one thing to watch out for I made another video about talking about this Windows
10s the Windows came out with don't get that don't get Windows 10 s. It's garbage
Just trust me on that one now if you're gonna be buying a pre-built computer one thing you want to look at is what?
Bloatware is pre-installed on there sometimes. You might see on the shelf
They have a demo unit and you can typically see what kind of like extra
Shortcuts are on the desktop, so if there's a ton of installed bloat where there's not much you can do about that
But I would just make sure when you do end up buying the computer go through and just I don't uninstall
Anything that you don't need because it'll just slow things down now for storage
Whether you're going with an SSD or a hard drive in this day and age
I'm gonna go out and say always get an SSD if you can there's really no reason to go for
HDD on a boot drive especially if you're gonna be storing a ton of data
And you know that I would get an SSD for your main drive and install your programs
and then yes get a big giant hard drive for all your data, but
SSDs are light years ahead of
HD DS in pretty much every way
especially especially if you have a laptop and
the reasons are numerous for this mostly because if you have a laptop that's gonna be moving around a lot a
SSD has no moving parts
Which is why it's called solid-state and a hard drive
does it's spinning platters the arms moving back and forth even having it sitting on your lap, that's gonna introduce a lot of movement and
Even though it is a 2.5 millimeter drive where it's going to generate less heat might last a little bit longer than the 3.5 inch
Drive to not millimeter what I said before
Then you want to go with SSD
It's just gonna be more durable which is even more important for a laptop which is prone to be
tossed or dropped when it's running not to mention the fact that a lot of times if you go with a
Regular hard drive on a laptop. It's going to be a
5400 rpm drive especially if you buy one pre-built and
That is gonna be way slower than a standard 3200 rpm drive on a regular desktop
So you're gonna be not only slower than an SSD, but you're gonna be slower than a regular
Typical hard drive you would see in a desktop
so it's like there's no reason to not get an SSD on a laptop and
Even on a desktop you want one just for the durability and the speed is so much more
I've been using this computer for three or four years now
It runs just as if it was new because I have an SSD and it doesn't have to get bogged down by programs
It doesn't matter how much you install on there because it doesn't have to be fragmented it can access all the information
Equally now finally for the core components that you have to look at is of course the graphic card
I'm not going to get too in-depth about the specs of that because
when it comes to graphics cards
typically if you're going with the latest generation you know the more you pay the better you're gonna get and
Just get the best one you can afford but you do want to look at the outputs and especially on laptops
This is important where you might be trying to hook TVs up to it, so I would recommend
obviously getting something with a
HDMI and also DisplayPort because a lot of monitors these days are
supporting DisplayPort either exclusively
In addition to HDMI is pretty ubiquitous, but if you want the best quality
DisplayPort right now is probably the best connection besides, maybe Thunderbolt
But you won't really see that unless you're on a Mac
but they do exist on PC now the next thing you're going to want to think about is whether you need an
Optical disc drive and you know when I first thought well
Yeah, of course you got to get a disk drive, but then I realized you know
I don't even know the last time I used mine
Maybe it was to install Windows or install some bootable program once or twice that I needed
But anything you can do with a disk drive these days pretty much all modern computers
Allow you to boot off of thumb drives
Which it makes them a lot more sense to use a thumb drive because they're rewritable you know you don't have to burn the disk
They can hold more so honestly these days
I don't even think you need an optical drive unless you have a specific reason unless you know you're gonna be
Installing Windows off of a disk then and for some reason you don't want to use a USB optical drive
But I would just save your money and not even get one now the next thing is you got to consider?
Or what kind of connections this computer has so not just USB but also Ethernet
What kind of speed is that Ethernet port I would definitely not get anything that isn't
Gigabit a hundred megabits these days no no no no no get a get at least a gigabit
I don't think you're really gonna see anything
That's ten gigabit unless you're buying like a really high-end motherboard, and you wouldn't know if you need ten gigabit
But it should be pretty standard
Just basically avoid anything that isn't Gigabit basically as for Wi-Fi. Yeah again
I think everything should have AC Wi-Fi by now if it doesn't that could be a red flag
And it could be like an older computer. That's been sitting on the shelf for a while one thing
You could look for is the upcoming Wi-Fi standard ax or even a H however
Those have not been finalized so they're not necessary at all
You'd probably be really hard to find something with a H or ax in them at all
but if you do happen to stumble across a
Motherboard with a Wi-Fi antenna or a laptop that does mention either ax or a H Wi-Fi then you know you're getting something that probably
is
bleeding edge it must be
Really new and it's something to look into a little bit more as for USB the latest thing of course is USB type-c
And there's also USB 3.1. Now those are not mutually exclusive
You can have USB see that is not USB 3.1
And of course sometimes USB three point one is just a regular USB
I did make another video you can watch here talking about
what USB C is and the different types of it if you want to watch that and
you can just click on that thing popping out, but I would say if you do see a
Computer with USB C or a motherboard with it that I would consider that a plus
Because I think a lot more phones specifically Android
But even other devices are going to be starting to use USB type-c as the standard
And it would just help to have that connection, so you don't need to use some sort of special converter
So those are all the main specs that you would expect
but what else is there to look for and one thing would be security features specifically wanted to see is if the computer has a
TPM or trusted platform module and this is going to allow you to use
some encryption features built into Windows and other features
It's basically a hardware chip that can generate encryption keys
Store them in a way where it's just more secure so if someone steals your computer tries to boot up
it's gonna be a lot harder for them to break in if the
Security keys are stored on this special. Chip as opposed to the hard drive
They're not going to be able to get if that computer is encrypted another thing to look for is if the specific
SSD in that computer has
hardware encryption
This is a higher-end feature so if you're buying something off the shelf unless it's like a workstation
You might not see this you would really have to look at the specific model of the SSD
But a lot of times higher-end SSDs
will have hardware encryption that is a feature that will literally encrypt everything on the fly and
Will not degrade the performance
So obviously there's BitLocker for Windows where you can encrypt the hard drive
And the operating system will encrypt and decrypt data as to being written to the drive
But if your hard drive actually supports Hardware crip ssin that means it has a special chip on it. That's going to be
Encrypting and decrypting before it even gets to the operating system, so there's not going to be any degrading in performance
And I would highly recommend that because it is extremely secure with really no downside
But it will cost you a little bit or now one more thing you're going to want to consider kind of
Indirectly related to the hardware is how upgradable this particular
PC is that you're gonna buy now if you're gonna be building the PC obviously this doesn't really apply
But a lot of times. I've seen typically lower end consumer pcs that have very very strange
internal configurations there
I guess proprietary that make it very very difficult to even open up or figure out where everything is and you have to
Unlatch weird things it just looks very strange, but if you have a PC that is
Open you know. It's pretty standard
Everything has good cable management, and it looks like if you wanted to replace a part
You could just pop it out put it back in that's a plus because perhaps you
See all the specs on here
And there's maybe one thing that you don't like like
there's not enough RAM or maybe the graphics card is a little bit out of date, and it would just be cheaper to
Buy a new graphics card, then it would be to buy another pre-built
That's more expensive with the better one
All those things would be a lot better if you just want to upgrade it and this would also be helpful if maybe you do
Go with a computer that is maybe last year's model, but it's still really good and again
There's just a couple things that you could upgrade and it'd be cheaper than buying the latest and greatest right off the bat
This is especially so for laptops which obviously a laptop
You can't really expect to be that upgradable
But I would at least hope that allows you to swap out the RAM and the hard drive
Those are two things that the laptop should let you replace and even maybe add to it check if there's
extra space for an empty slot of RAM so maybe it has enough
but later on you want to add more you can add more without having to buy a whole new set of RAM and having to
Get rid of the current one yet another thing you need to look out for is having to do the CPU
But not the CPU and the computer, but rather what CPUs are coming out soon. This is something
you will have to do a little bit of research on and hopefully you're doing research anyway if you're going to buy a computer, but
Definitely be aware of Intel and AMD s upgrade cycle
so you might see that the
Computer you have your eye on or even if you're building the CPU you have your eye on
You'll see that it might be a particular generation and it might be the latest, but if you look at press releases
And you look at some rumors and other things that
Might suggest that Intel is going to be coming out with I don't know they might be announcing a new
processor line the next month or the next two months and
Obviously you're never going to be able to keep up because they do release it a couple times a year some sort of upgraded
Processors, so don't worry about if you don't have the absolute latest
But also keep in mind that if they do release a new processor
Then it might make the previous ones cheaper, so you might
Want to just wait until they drop the new processor if it's gonna be pretty soon
And then pick up older ones cheaper or get that new one right off the back and of course that same thing is gonna go
with particular GPUs graphics cards
I don't think there's really release schedules for RAM as much
But definitely for CPUs and GPUs of course one thing you can't forget about is the warranty
Yes, you hope
It's not gonna break and a lot of people kind of ignore the warranty just because they assume that if they buy something it's gonna
Work, but it is something to look at another thing you want to look for kind of related to this is
Specifically if you're going to be buying a copy of Windows like if you're gonna be building a PC
you'll want to decide whether you want to get an OEM or a
regular copy of Windows and the difference is OAM copies of Windows are going to be cheaper and
the OEM stands for original equipment
manufacturer and those are basically the kinds that are installed by like Lenovo or
Samsung or whatever
Manufacturers are making the PC and that means that they're going to be responsible for the support of the computer
So if you're not buying from one of those manufacturers, but you're buying an OEM disk
Yes, it's going to be cheaper
but that kind of means you're on your own and
Microsoft is not going to be obligated to really support you because you bought an OEM copy
It's cheaper for a reason whereas if you buy the full priced?
Regular version of Windows then that means they're a little bit more obligated you might get better support for it
So that's just something to keep in mind. I'm not sure how much of
True that is these days, but I'm sure there is a difference because there are still om versions out there
So I think that should cover everything
We went over very basic stuff and a little bit more advanced stuff for people building it, but hopefully
Everyone got a little bit more information
that should be helpful the next time you're going to get a new PC and upgrade if you guys enjoyed this video be sure to
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Again, I'm looking forward to hearing from you guys, so thanks so much for watching. I'll see you next time. Have a good one