In general, physically building your own PC is not hard at all, even if you have limited technical experience. Most PC components are designed to be plug-and-play, meaning that you usually can build an entire PC with nothing other than a screwdriver and a simple manual. The whole process can often be done in an hour or two.

Without a doubt, the hardest part of building your own PC is simply knowing which individual component to select for the build. There are numerous options for CPUs, motherboards, RAM, GPUs, etc, and it can be difficult for a beginner to know which parts to combine.

That’s the way-too-short answer and, if you’re new to this whole process, you’ll definitely have plenty of questions and concerns. But don’t be intimidated- a DIY PC is almost certainly going to save you money and perform better than a pre-built.

We created this quick guide to give you a good understanding of how easy/hard it will be for you to create your own build that fits your own specific needs. And we put a special emphasis on simplifying component selection (the hardest part of the whole process).

Introduction

So you’re thinking of building your own PC, but there’s something holding you back from taking the leap.

Maybe it seems too complicated for you, or maybe you’re afraid you’ll pick out the wrong components. Maybe you have a sinking feeling that you’ll accidentally break all your expensive new computer parts while you try to put it all together.

Building a computer sounds like it should be a difficult undertaking best left to those sci-fi-loving IT geeks or the bigwigs at Intel and Dell…but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

A DIY PC is the best (and only) way to make your perfect rig a reality. You can work and game on a computer you grab off the shelf, but there’s nothing like having a machine that you built from the ground up to your exact specifications.

You (probably) can’t build yourself a personalized car or assemble your ideal smartphone, and you can’t design and build your perfect home without the help of a whole crew (and a ton of money). Computers may be some of the only electronics—or big purchases in general—that you can truly personalize down to the finest details.

That may be enough to convince you. If not, chances are you’ll feel a lot better about building a new computer by the time you finish reading this piece. It’ll walk you through choosing your components, making sure they’re all compatible with each other, what risks are involved, and some other info that’ll help you make an informed decision.

But first, a question: Why build a PC instead of buying a pre-built one?

Pre-Built PC vs Building Your Own PC

There’s nothing wrong with buying a pre-built computer. Building a PC isn’t for everyone, and there’s no rule saying you can’t be a real gamer or computer whiz if you opt for a pre-built model. That being said, however, there are some real disadvantages that come with those pre-built PCs.

The first problem with buying a pre-built PC is the price. Manufacturers add a nice margin for themselves on the PCs they build, so almost any pre-built PC will be more expensive than the exact same computer built on your own.

See for yourself: Pick out a computer from a retailer like Best Buy, see what parts they use, and see if you can find the same parts online and add up the prices. You may be surprised at just how much of a premium manufacturers put on pre-built machines.

For all that money you’d think pre-built machines would only have premium parts, right? Yeah, not exactly. A lot of manufacturers win bids to build PCs by coming in at the lowest possible price, which naturally means a lot of cut corners.

It’s all in the details; they’ll often grab your attention by putting the (actually quite good) CPU or GPU front and center while quietly slipping a bunch of bargain-bin RAM, an off-brand motherboard, barely functional storage, or a hilariously inadequate cooling system (or no cooling system at all).

You may have better luck with some pre-built brands than others, but you should always take their spec sheets with a grain of salt and dig into it for yourself.

Another problem with pre-builts comes in the form of bloatware. Pre-built computers don’t just come with an operating system installed, they also come with a bunch of extra programs you never asked for.

Programs like “free” trials of antivirus software, random games, and other third-party apps you’ll never use. Manufacturers get paid to install all this garbage on their pre-build computers, and while it may not actually hurt your computer, bloatware can adversely affect its performance.

It takes up storage space, runs processes in the background (even while you’re not using it), and generally makes a nuisance of itself until you remove it.

There’s nothing wrong with buying a pre-built computer, but it’s hardly the best choice for anyone with even a modicum of technical knowhow. You’re going to want to build your own PC if you plan on doing anything more involved than browsing the internet. So now that you know that, it’s time to move on to the first step toward building your perfect PC: Finding the right components.

Picking The Right PC Parts

Every computer needs a few key components to function: A motherboard, a processor, some RAM, a storage device, a power supply, and, if you’re a gamer, a graphics card.

You’ll also need a case, some kind of cooling system, a monitor, a keyboard, and a mouse.

As we’ve said, compared to physically installing everything, this is usually the hardest part of a DIY PC build. You’ll want to make sure you know what you need, what you don’t need, and how it all works together.

We’ll cover each critical component piece-by-piece to help you know exactly how to choose.

Picking The Right CPU

The processor (CPU) is perhaps the most essential part of any PC. They’re essentially the brains of the computing world; they interpret and execute instructions, run programs, and are generally in charge of telling the other components what to do.

There are two companies that produce CPUs today: Intel and AMD. Both firms offer a whole range of CPUs to fit just about any budget and use case, and neither has a clear advantage over the other in terms of performance or versatility.

Picking an AMD or an Intel CPU will lock you into their respective ecosystems, however, so keep in mind that you won’t be able to mix and match your motherboard, CPU, and (often) storage device.

Aside from the manufacturer, the most important aspects of a CPU are how many cores it has, its clock speed, and the size of its cache. Picking out the right one can be tricky, but you can narrow it down pretty well if you know what kind of computer you’re trying to build.

You don’t need to break the bank on a super-powerful processor if you’re only planning on using your computer for doing schoolwork, for example, but you also don’t want to opt for something cheap and weak if you’re going to do anything remotely resource intensive.

Here’s some advice to help you narrow it down:

AMD or Intel CPU?

While AMD used to be the cheap, less-impressive alternative to Intel, it’s really come into its own in recent years. Newer AMD CPUs are just as powerful and versatile as their Intel counterparts, and they’re often cheaper, too. You’ll be just fine regardless of which company you go for.

Which CPU is right for you really comes down to two things: Your budget and what you want to do with it. Here are a few general recommendations based on what you plan to do with your new computer.

What CPU for Basic Computing?

If you’re planning on using your new computer for stuff like browsing the internet, watching videos, checking your social media, and working with basic documents, you probably don’t need anything too extravagant. You’ll probably get by just fine with an entry-level CPU like an Intel Core i3-10100F or an AMD Athlon 200GE. You could go for something more expensive, sure, but there’s really no reason to unless you plan on upgrading your other components in the future.

What CPU for Gaming?

Most games rely more on GPUs than CPUs, so you may be better off going for a midrange CPU and spending the extra money on a better GPU. That doesn’t mean you can skimp out on a CPU—you still need a decent one to game no matter how powerful your GPU—but it does mean you don’t need to drop over $400 or $500 on a CPU. Something like an Intel Core i5-12600K or an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X would give you plenty of power without breaking the bank.

What CPU for Data Processing and Creative Work?

Some creative work can be handled by your computer’s GPU, but most of the more intensive stuff you’ll do in your average workday—managing spreadsheets, crunching numbers, running reports, etc—rely heavily on your computer’s CPU. And since faster processing means faster results, spending the money on a good CPU now can save you time and make you more productive in the future.

You’ll want to splurge for something high end like an Intel Core i9-11900KF or an absolute beast like the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X. The sticker price may be a bit of a shocker but remember, time is money.

Picking The Right RAM

RAM (Random-Access Memory) is a bit like your computer’s short-term memory. It stores all the data and instructions for all your active programs so your CPU can access it quickly, and it’s what lets your computer manage multiple open programs and browser tabs at once.

Too little RAM will make your computer run sluggishly, and excess RAM will sit there unused, so you’re really looking for the right amount of the right type of RAM to get you in the Goldilocks zone where you aren’t wasting time or money.

Thankfully, RAM is easier to pick out than a CPU. RAM (with very few exceptions) will work just as well with an AMD CPU as it will with an Intel CPU, so you have a lot more freedom of choice, and picking it out is pretty straightforward. All you need to consider is the RAM’s generation, its speed, and how much of it you want.

As far as which brand/model of RAM to opt for, check out our guide to whether or not RAM brand matters. It has everything you need to know in order to avoid paying for things you don’t need, along with compatibility info.

RAM Generation

Most of the cost-effective RAM you’ll find on the market is of the DDR4 generation. DDR5 generation RAM exists, but it’s new, expensive, and not widely available (though this is changing fairly quickly).

And while you can technically opt for cheaper DDR3 RAM, it’s almost certainly worth the extra few bucks to bump up to DDR4. Part of it is performance—DDR4 has higher bandwidth and faster speeds—and part of it is compatibility; most newer motherboards only have DDR4-compatible slots, so there’s really no point to buying DDR3.

RAM Speed

There’s a decent amount of variation in RAM speeds even among models of the same generation. DDR4 RAM can operate as slowly as 800MHz and supposedly maxes out at 3200MHz, but firms like Kingston and HyperX have worked their magic to accelerate their RAM’s performance well past the supposed limit. It’s safe to say that you shouldn’t settle for any RAM with advertised speeds below 3000MHz.

RAM Amount

This largely comes down to personal preference, your computer’s intended use, and how long you plan on keeping your new rig before upgrading.

Minimum: 8GB is the bare minimum you should shoot for. It’ll give your PC the power to manage a few lightweight programs at once, run some games, and even do a bit of light photo or video editing.
Ideal for Most: 16GB of RAM will be more than enough for everyday stuff, and just enough to handle more in-depth creative work and run more demanding games in higher resolution. You probably won’t need any more than 16GB outside of a few special situations.

For Special Situations

32GB of RAM is what’s recommended for people who do heavy-duty modeling work, animating, editing huge videos, designing games, or anything that might require lots and lots of rendering. 32GB is overkill for the vast majority of users, however, so there’s really no reason to spend the money unless you’re planning on using your personal PC as a creative powerhouse.

Picking The Right Storage

This one’s easy. There are two main types of storage devices on the market: Hard drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs), with HDDs being the older, slower, more conventional choices and SSDs being the faster, newer, and almost objectively better options.

When you’re on this step, definitely take a look at our guide that covers when SSDs are worth the extra money and when they might not be.

You only have to consider three factors when you’re looking for a storage device: Capacity, price, and transfer speeds. Here’s a quick breakdown of what to look for.

Capacity

A HDD or SSD’s capacity is the total amount of data it can store. Hard drives have higher maximum capacities and tend to be cheaper on a $/GB basis, though SSDs have been catching up in recent years. How much storage space you need depends on what you’re going to do with your computer, but it’s probably safe to say you want at least 1TB of storage. You’ll want a lot more if you plan on installing a ton of games or storing a lot of big files, and you may not need as much if you’re going to use your PC for basic stuff, however, so the choice is ultimately up to you.

Transfer Speeds

Your PC’s operating system, programs, and files all live in its storage drive. It takes time to boot up the OS, load programs, and open files, and it takes more or less time depending on your storage drive’s transfer speeds. Higher transfer speeds mean faster startups and loading times, which translates to a snappier, more responsive computing experience.

Lightning-fast transfer speeds are one of the main selling points of SSDs, and especially NVMe SSDs. We also recently did a complete head-to-head comparison of NVMe SSDs versus standard SATA SSDs.

Where it might take upwards of a minute to boot up or restart your operating system off of a hard drive, a solid-state drive will finish the same operation in a matter of seconds. SSDs all-but eliminate loading times in games, make programs and big files load in the blink of an eye, and make pretty much every other interaction with your PC feel smoother and snappier.

Price

Price is the one main advantage HDDs have over SSDs. SSDs have dropped in price quite a bit since they were first introduced, but you’ll still be hard-pressed to find a SSD that’s cheaper in $/GB than a HDD. NVMe SSDs are even pricier than standard SSDs, but many users find the added price more than worth it for NVMe SSDs’ ridiculously fast transfer speeds.

Picking The Right Motherboard

A PC’s motherboard is a kind of circuit board that houses the other components and facilitates communication between them.

Each motherboard has a set of slots to accommodate the computer’s other components, and the type, shape, and generation of the slots determines what components it’s compatible with. If you choose an AMD CPU you’ll need to pick an AMD-compatible motherboard, or vice-versa if you opt for an Intel CPU.

When you look for motherboards online you’ll see that each one lists what kind of sockets/slots it has as well as its chipset (integrated components that work with the CPU and enable different functions).

It’s a good idea to make sure your components are compatible with the motherboard you’re looking at (manually or with an online service), but otherwise you have a lot of leeway here.

Just don’t skimp out on a motherboard, otherwise you may find your computer’s foundation crumbling long before the rest of the components. We documented this in our guide to determining if your motherboard is a bottleneck for your build.

Picking a Power Supply

This one’s also pretty easy. All you need to do is add up the amount of power your other components need, add at least 100W to the total power consumption figure (for safety and future upgrades), and find a well-reviewed PSU that puts out at least that many watts.

The “well-reviewed” part is important, by the way. The PSU powers all your delicate, expensive computer components, so you’ll really want to spend the money on one that’ll provide clean and safe power.

There are plenty of good PSU options out there. We tend to like Seasonic and Corsair, but they are certainly not the only solid choices.

Picking a GPU (Optional)

The reason we all this step “optional” is that most (but not all) CPUs include integrated graphics. In layman’s terms, this just means that there is a light-duty GPU built in to the CPUs capabilities.

We can’t stress this enough: If you opt for a PC build without a dedicated GPU, make sure you pick a CPU that includes integrated graphics!

If you need extra help deciding, read through our complete breakdown of dedicated vs integrated GPUs. It has everything you need to know in order to determine whether or not

You’re going to need a GPU if you’re planning on building a gaming rig or doing any kind of serious rendering or creative work. Very few modern games will even run without a dedicated GPU, and more and more creative programs are opting to offload their processing from the CPU to the GPU.

It can be tough to figure out which GPU is right for you. There are a ton of different models on the market (or there will be when the chip shortage eases), and AMD and NVIDIA GPUs can work with both AMD and Intel CPUs, so it can be tough to narrow it down. GPUs can also be one of the most expensive parts of your computer, so it isn’t a choice you can take lightly.

You have three options, none of which are better or worse than the others:

• Buy the most expensive/high-end GPU you can afford.
• Opt for a midrange card like an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 or an AMD Radeon RX 5700
• Look up your favorite game on Steam, check the recommended specs/components, and buy the card listed

Picking a PC Case

Choosing a PC case is often equal parts function and aesthetics. You can opt for all sorts of designs, shape, and sizes, but the main thing you need to be aware of is whether or not your parts will fit.

There are seven commonly sold types of PC cases. Each type is classified by the type/size of motherboard it can accept, along with its general form factor.

Here’s a list of the PC case types and the motherboards they commonly accept:

• Full Tower: Accepts ATX and many accept eATX (Extended ATX) motherboards
• Mid Tower: Most accept ATX size motherboards and Micro ATX motherboards
• Mini Tower: Most accept Micro ATX and Mini ATX motherboards
• Desktop: Accepts some Micro ATX and Mini ATX motherboards
• Small Form Factor: Usually only accept Mini ATX motherboards
• Ultra Small Form Factor: Accepts Mini ATX motherboards
• Micro: Usually only accepts specialty integrated motherboards

Aside from the motherboard size compatibility (we cover that later in this article), you’ll be basing your case selection mostly off of your own aesthetic choices, other space considerations, and fan placement.

GPUs, in particular, are the main component you need to make sure will fit in your case. Some cases can handle a massive motherboard, but don’t have the side-to-side clearance for the larger GPUs on the market.

Picking Fans & Cooling Systems

When building your own PC, your potential fan options are usually determined by the case you select.

Lots of cases include fans, making your job even easier. The ones that don’t include fans will still have specific slot/spaces pre-drilled and ready for fans.

CPU fans and CPU liquid coolers are another important factor that you’ll need to decide on. Most of the time, a simple heatsink with a fan is plenty good enough. But for high-end, demanding builds, liquid cooling can be a great choice.

There are also lots of all-in-one CPU coolers on the market nowadays. These are basically luxury, closed-loop, plug-and-play coolers for your CPU.

Cooling your custom PC build is arguably the most variable and potentially creative part of the entire process. There are literally hundreds of products and layout combinations you can experiment with.

Rather than try to detail all of that here, we’ll strongly recommend that you check out our guide to PC fans and airflow.

Conclusion

Building a PC is a lot easier than you might think. Picking out the parts is the hardest part; anyone with functioning hands and a screwdriver can put a PC together once you have the components.

Just make sure you do your own research, follow some how-to videos to make sure you’re putting it together right, and enjoy your brand-new PC.

Oh, and welcome to the club.

The post How Hard is Building Your Own PC? (A Quick & Honest Guide) appeared first on Cybersided.

Generally, SSDs are almost always worth it, even though they are more expensive than traditional HDDs. An SSD will be much faster, more reliable, more efficient, and save space compared to a hard drive. Usually, the only reason to choose an HDD over an SSD would be to save money on very large storage capacity.

That’s the short-and-sweet answer, but there are some important considerations/recommendations before you decide what’s going to work best for your PC (and budget).

This quick guide will dive deep into the details that actually matter for you. When you’re done here, we guarantee you’ll know exactly whether or not an SSD is worth it for your PC.

By the way: Before you commit to buying an SSD, we highly recommend reading our guide to the performance differences between M.2 SSDs and 2.5″ SATA SSDs. It’s a big deal, but often overlooked when choosing a drive.

Solid-State Drives vs Hard Drives

Hard drives (HDDs) store data on spinning magnetic discs. The discs are durable, offer huge amounts of storage space, and can be easily overwritten, but they’re too slow to keep up with even the weakest modern CPUs.

The fastest HDDs spin at up to 15,000 RPM, and it takes a good HDD about 10 to 15 milliseconds to read and access data, which seems pretty fast…until you realize that’s millions of times as long as it takes an average CPU to complete an action. These rotational and mechanical limitations also severely limit HDDs’ read and write speeds, with all but the most expensive models barely able to reach 200MB/sec.

Solid-state drives do things a bit differently. Instead of spinning discs, SSDs store data on non-volatile chips packed with NAND flash memory cells, which offers a number of tangible benefits compared to HDDs.

The lack of moving parts makes SSDs operate silently and makes them more resistant to physical damage, and their flash memory cells consume less power than an HDD and are easier to miniaturize for use in laptops and smaller devices. Flash memory also offers significantly faster read/write times compared to HDDs.

Standard 2.5-inch SSDs are limited to transfer speeds of 600MB/sec by their SATA interfaces, but newer SSDs have gotten around those limitations by utilizing the much faster PCIe slots and optimizing performance using the NVMe protocol.

Matter of fact, today’s best PCIe NVMe SSDs can reach read and write speeds of up to a blistering 7GB/sec.

Here’s a quick comparison to show you just how drastic the difference can be between the read and write performance of PCIe NVMe SSDs and HDDs:

The Seagate Exos 2×14 has billed itself as the fastest HDD in existence. It can reach sustained read and write speeds of up to 524MB/sec.

The Kingston KC3000 is another monster performer. It can reach read and write speeds of up to 7GB/sec, 13.36 times as fast as the Seagate Exos 2×14.

That’s great and all, but those numbers don’t mean much without context. The next sections will give you the specifics on all the benefits from going with a SSD over an HDD.

When is an SSD Worth It?

SSDs’ lower power requirements, silent operation, and greater physical durability are all important benefits, but they pale in comparison to the real benefit: Speed.

Having faster storage is a bigger deal than you’d think.

Your computer accesses its storage all the time; booting up the operating system, loading programs, saving and retrieving files, and all kinds of other operations that happen under the hood. You may have heard that having an SSD makes your computer boot up faster, but you may not know just how much faster.

A computer with an SSD can do a full restart in a matter of a few seconds and can log you onto your user profile in the blink of an eye, and that’s just the start. You can install the biggest applications in seconds. Programs load instantly. Files are open and at your fingertips as soon as you click on them.

Computers with HDDs will seem like they’re working in slow motion. You’ll never want to go back.

Just about anyone with an HDD will benefit from upgrading to an SSD, and anyone with a SATA SSD will benefit from upgrading to a PCIe NVMe SSD. There are really only a couple of cases where you’d want to stick with an HDD.

Types of Games That Benefit Most from SSDs

Gaming performance is no doubt one of the biggest considerations that factor in to many users deciding on storage for their PC.

Without question, SSDs are worth it for gaming. This is especially true for games that have lots of loading screens, large maps, or are texture-heavy. The difference loading games on an SSD vs an HDD is substantial.

Strategy games like Total Warhammer, open world RPG games like The Witcher or Elder Scrolls, racing games with large maps like Forza– these are the types of games that have massive performance increases with an SSD.

Even relatively lightweight competitive games like Valorant, League of Legends, Rocket League, Apex Legends, etc, will have some noticeable gains with an SSD.

With an SSD you’ll forget many of your games ever had loading screens, and you may see a big boost in performance and framerate. Literally every action will feel a bit (or a lot) snappier and more responsive.

When is an HDD Worth It?

As wonderful as SSDs are, they do have a few downsides compared to HDDs. The first one is obvious: price.

You’ll be hard-pressed to find an SSD that offers the same value (in $/GB) as all but the most expensive HDDs, so you may be stuck with an HDD if you can’t find an SSD that fits both your budget and your data storage needs.

The second disadvantage SSDs have compared to HDDs is tied to pricing: storage capacity.

While you can technically find SSDs with capacities well into the TBs, the larger SSDs are too expensive to be practical for many users. HDDs offer much more storage space for the price, so an SSD may not be the right call for you if you need those extra TB of storage space.

Truthfully, there aren’t many modern cases where you’d want to stick with an HDD instead of upgrading to an SSD. The potential upside is huge, and the benefits are more than enough to outweigh SSDs’ greater cost and lower capacities.

Hopefully you’ve seen enough to convince you that SSDs are worth it, but you may still have a couple of concerns you need addressed. Maybe you’ve heard that SSDs aren’t as reliable or long-lasting as HDDs, and that vague but ominous information is holding you back from pulling the trigger.

Are SSDs Reliable and Long-Lasting?

The first SSDs to hit the consumer electronics market suffered from a few major drawbacks: Price, capacity, longevity, and reliability.

We’ve already talked about the price and capacity—both of which have improved over the years—but have SSDs’ become more reliable and long-lasting since they were first introduced?

In a word: Yes.

Early SSDs suffered from limited write endurance, meaning data could only be written to their NAND flash cells so many times before the cells wore out and stopped working entirely.

Newer SSDs sport improved flash cells and utilize a number of techniques to minimize wear and tear, and the results speak for themselves. Modern SSDs also boast endurance ratings of 3,000 TBW (terabytes written) or more, which should be more than enough for the vast majority of users.

Determining whether SSDs last as long as HDDs is a bit tricky, as you’ll get different answers depending on where you look. Some say HDDs and SSDs have very similar failure rates and overall lifespans—between 5 to 10 years—and others say that SSDs are more likely to fail earlier due to their write limits.

This (not quite scientific) study by Backblaze, a cloud storage company, was referenced by many online publications as evidence that SSDs are slightly more reliable than HDDs, but the accuracy of the study is up for debate.

For now it’s probably safe to assume you’ll want to replace your SSD about as frequently as you’d replace an HDD: About every 3 (if you’re being extra cautious) to 5 years.

And since HDDs are infamous for slowing down as they fill up, chances are a 5-year-old SSD will still perform much better than an HDD of the same age.

History of SSDs

Data storage technology has come a long way in the last century. It all started with punch cards, then moved to magnetic drums, magnetic tape drives, and magnetic cores, and floppy discs, none of which could store more than a few KB.

The advent of the personal computer kicked the development of data storage technology into high gear, and soon the floppy disc was supplanted by miniaturized hard drive discs that offered faster data transfers and greater storage capacities.

Hard drive technology proved to be as malleable as it is durable, and the drives’ capacities grew exponentially even as their form factors became more compact and portable. As programs grew in size and complexity, however, it became clear that even hard drives with the faster SATA interface couldn’t transfer data quickly enough to meet the ever-increasing needs of modern software.

Users would only put up with minutes-long bootup sequences and interminable loading times for so long, so manufacturers began the search for a viable replacement for hard drives. Much to their (and everyone else’s) surprise, the solution didn’t come from some futuristic new development, but from a technology that was first pioneered in the 1970s: Solid-state drives.

Solid-state drives spent decades as the exclusive purview of researchers and forward-thinking businesses with big mainframes and bigger budgets.

This began to change when the first patent for a flash-based SSD was filed in 1989, but it took almost another twenty years for the technology to become affordable and ubiquitous enough to actually pose a threat to HDDs’ dominance of the consumer data storage industry.

SSDs have been steadily gaining in popularity as their capacities have grown and their prices have dropped. More and more new laptops and prebuilt desktops come with SSDs instead of HDDs, and fewer and fewer computer hobbyists are choosing HDDs as their main data storage.

Conclusion

SSDs are worth paying for. They may be slightly more expensive in terms of $/GB, but they more than make up for the added price with their insane read and write speeds, especially if you opt for a PCIe NVMe SSD.

It’s hard to overstate just how much an SSD will improve your computing experience. It’s hard to adequately explain how much better they feel to use than HDDs, and we definitely recommend that you experience that for yourself.

The post Are SSDs Worth It? (Real-World Pros & Cons vs HDDs) appeared first on Cybersided.

SSAA (short for supersampling) is one of the earliest and arguably most effective approaches to anti-aliasing. Like other anti-aliasing techniques, the aim of supersampling is to reduce the jagged edges that result from rendering curved or rounded images using square pixels. Supersampling attempts to correct this with a brute-force approach that’s as ingenious as it is impractical.

SSAA can be very beneficial to the graphical quality of a video game, but it can also cause a huge reduction in framerate. This means that many fast-paced competitive gamers will turn off SSAA unless their system is quite powerful and can utilize it without a performance reduction.

This quick guide will tell you everything you need to know about SSAA and help you determine whether or not you should personally turn it on or off while gaming.

How SSAA (Supersampling) Works

Explaining supersampling is a bit tricky, but the principle behind it is relatively simple.

Say a computer is running a game and is about to render a frame in the system’s native resolution. Without supersampling, the computer will just render the frame as is. If supersampling is enabled, however, things get a little weird.

Computers typically render images from the ground up. Supersampling flips that on its head. The supersampling process makes the computer render the image at a higher than native resolution, makes it shrink, or downscale, the image down to fit the screen, and then display it on the monitor.

There are a lot of pixels left over when you downscale an image—4K has four times as many pixels as 1080p, for example—and those extra pixels are the difference between fine details and rough approximations.

Supersampling analyzes and averages those extra pixels to better replicate the higher resolution image in a lower resolution, which greatly improves the image quality.

In other words: using supersampling to back into a lower resolution image from a higher resolution render gives you much better results than building that low-resolution image from the ground up.

Here’s a quick video of a YouTuber toggling SSAA on and off for an in-game demonstration:

There’s a lot more to it, but that’s the gist of how supersampling works.

Benefits of SSAA

Supersampling is arguably the most effective anti-aliasing technique. It almost eliminates jagged edges and makes the transitions between object edges and their surroundings look significantly smoother than they would otherwise, which results in much clearer, more natural-looking images.

This has a particularly pronounced effect in gaming, especially in titles with near photorealistic graphics, as clearer, less jagged graphics translates directly to greater immersion and graphical fidelity.

Supersampling is essentially the granddaddy of anti-aliasing, and creates much better results than most other approaches, but it also comes with some serious drawbacks.

Drawbacks of SSAA

If you’re running a game at 60 or 120 frames per second, that means your computer has to render 60 or 120 individual images every second. That’s a tall order, especially when you’re playing in a high resolution. It takes a pretty powerful computer with a good graphics card to play anything at 120fps in the first place, and supersampling doesn’t exactly reduce the computational burden.

With supersampling turned on, running a game at 120fps means your computer will effectively have to render 240 frames per second. And twice as many frames means twice as much processing power required, right? Not quite.

Remember that supersampling works by generating a much higher resolution image and downscaling it to fit your settings, so you’re essentially making it render 120 huge frames and 120 small frames per second.

If you’re playing in 1080p, for instance, and your computer supersamples up to 4K before downscaling it, you’re making it render five times as many pixels (4K = 4x 1080p) as it would without supersampling. Add in the processing power required to perform the actual sampling, averaging, and adjusting and you’re looking at significantly more than twice as many resources required to run the game.

Supersampling gobbles up buffer capacity, graphical processing power, and memory bandwidth, which can be kind of a dealbreaker for most systems.

As with all things that make a PC or console do a lot of heavy lifting, supersampling can also create a lot of heat, which can be a problem if there’s not adequate airflow.

Needless to say, supersampling isn’t exactly the most practical solution for anti-aliasing, so programmers have developed a number of other approaches, including a few variations on supersampling itself.

When to Turn SSAA On

The short answer is that you should use supersampling if you want to and if your computer can handle it.

It depends on the game in question—some games might not support it—and whether your graphics card has enough horsepower to do it without tanking your framerate, but if you have the right games and the right specs then go right ahead with turning supersampling on.

It should be noted that not all graphics cards have the drivers or offer the option for regular supersampling.

Again, this depends on your card’s make and model, but there is a chance you’ll be stuck with multisampling or some other anti-aliasing technique that isn’t a descendent of supersampling.

When to Turn SSAA Off

This one’s even easier: You shouldn’t use supersampling if your computer can’t handle it or if you really need to squeeze extra frames into competitive games.

The extra burden supersampling puts on your system can absolutely annihilate your framerate and grind everything down to a near halt, and no amount of anti-aliasing is worth ruining your gaming experience to that extent.

Your computer may be powerful enough to play some games with supersampling turned on (if it’s supported), but it may not have the power to handle supersampling with newer, more demanding titles.

Like we covered with ray tracing and also with triple buffering, there’s no doubt that SSAA is a performance drainer.

If games like Apex Legends, CS:GO, Valorant, COD, etc are all up your alley, SSAA may be a problem for you, unless you have a beastly system.

Multisampling

Multisampling is, as you might guess, a type of supersampling. It was developed as a sort of computational compromise; a way to get most of the benefits of supersampling without consuming as many resources.

Supersampling works by literally sampling multiple parts of each individual pixel in the higher resolution image, rendering them, and combining them with the others to produce the pixels in the lower resolution image. It does this for every pixel in the whole higher resolution image, even those in uniform textures and other places where jagged edges wouldn’t occur or be noticed.

Multisampling tries to reduce the amount of processing power required by replacing supersampling’s brute force with a bit of finesse. It makes the computer render as much of the frame as possible without performing any anti-aliasing, then performs a test to detect the edges of objects in the frame where aliasing would be most apparent. If edges are detected, the process does much of the same sampling and testing as it would with regular supersampling. This more calculated approach helps save a lot of processing power.

The other way multisampling saves resources is by putting much stricter limits on the number of samples it takes in each frame. Instead of doing extensive color, texture, and shader sampling, multisampling focuses on the pixel’s depth and one or two other factors. This also helps reduce the amount of processing power required for anti-aliasing, which leaves more capacity leftover for other tasks like maintaining the framerate and simulating in-game interactions.

Multisampling doesn’t do quite as good a job at anti-aliasing as supersampling, but it isn’t nearly as taxing to most systems. Most non bargain-bin graphics cards can handle multisampling just fine, which is probably why it’s used much more than regular supersampling.

What is Anti-Aliasing?

Understanding supersampling anti-aliasing starts with understanding anti-aliasing; what is it, why is it done, and how (generally) it works.

It may look like the picture on your computer screen is one cohesive image, but it’s actually more of a dynamic mosaic comprised of thousands of tiny square pixels that light up and change colors when your computer tells them to.

More pixels means clearer, more detailed images, but there’s no amount of pixels that can overcome one simple but crucial fact: Most things in this world aren’t perfectly square.

To get a better idea of why that’s a problem, imagine a horizontal line made of little squares. The line looks nice and straight when all the squares are perfectly arranged, but the picture changes dramatically when you use those same squares to draw a diagonal or curved line.

Squares aren’t great at making smooth curved edges, so you’ll end up with diagonal lines that look like staircases and “curves” with more jagged edges than a ball of barbed wire.

This staircase-like phenomenon is called aliasing. Anti-aliasing, as you may have guessed, is the general term for computational techniques used to mitigate this ugly byproduct of pixels’ unfortunate geometry.

How Anti-Aliasing Works

Anti-aliasing doesn’t actually change the shape of pixels or actually smooth anything out. Instead, anti-aliasing basically works by partially changing the colors of pixels to make them blend in with the background.

Think of it like this: If you took a diagonal line made of square pixels (the one that looks like a staircase) and changed the color of the squares’ edges to blend in with the background, it’d kind of make the line look smoother, right?

The squares and their jaggedness are still there, but that doesn’t really matter as long as the picture looks right.

Final Thoughts & Recommendations

Supersampling is one of the most powerful tools in the battle against aliasing, but that power comes at an extreme (computational) cost. Making your computer render each frame in a high resolution, sample its every pixel multiple times, and downscale the frame to fit your screen takes a lot of juice, so it’s no wonder why supersampling isn’t widely used outside of very specific situations.

If your computer has the power—and the game and graphics card support it—however, supersampling is the most effective way to reduce the amount of jagged edges and abrupt transitions between in-game objects for a cleaner, more natural look.

The post SSAA: What Is It & Should You Turn it On or Off? appeared first on Cybersided.

Vertical stacking monitors can save desk space and is especially useful for editing, but this layout is also a lot less practical than horizontally stacked monitors for many applications. Gamers, especially, will likely find vertically stacked monitors to be less-than-ideal.

That’s our way-too-short take, but there’s plenty more to think about before definitively deciding whether a vertical layout is right for your setup.

This quick guide will cover everything you need about the in’s and out’s of vertical stacking monitors. From practicality to individual scenarios that fit this layout, we’ve got you covered.

Pros and Cons of Vertical Stacked Monitor Setups

Multi-monitor setups are becoming more and more common, and for good reason. Having multiple monitors can be a godsend to anyone working with multiple documents or applications at once, and there are real productivity benefits that come from being able to shift focus between them without alt+tabbing, minimizing, or maximizing windows.

Constructing a multi-monitor setup has never been easier or more cost-effective, and more and more users are taking the plunge.

Most multi-monitor setups are horizontal—having two or more monitors sitting next to each other—but sometimes the horizontal approach isn’t viable or desirable.

Vertical stacking, is much less common, but there are some good reasons why it is sometimes preferable to a horizontal setup.

Pros:

• Saves desk space
• Lets you go multi-monitor in space-constrained workstations
• Helpful for working with music editing programs
• Extra screen offers more real estate for watching dataflows
• Great for standing desks
• Lets operations professionals keep an eye on KPIs and real-time performance
• Adds another screen for monitoring security camera feeds

Cons:

• Less useful than horizontal setup for most tasks
• Not very helpful for gaming, watching media, or other personal computing
• Need to buy, construct, and set up a special mount
• Harder to keep track of information than with a horizontal setup
• Generally easier to move mouse left to right than up and down
• Need to look up all the time can be bad for your neck

P.S. – If you want to skip all of this and get the pros of vertical stacking without any of the cons , our recommendation would be to get a mount that can do both vertical and horizontal.

The Ergotron LX (Here’s a link to its current price on Amazon) is a premium choice, but it’s a fantastic mount for flexibility and reliability.

If you think your setup could benefit even slightly from occasionally switching to a vertical stack, it’s probably more than worth it to save yourself the headache and splurge on this.

We’ll cover more vertical mount recommendations later in this guide.

Productivity Benefits of Vertical Stacked Monitors

Horizontal setups are better for most school and office work, but there are some professional applications that work as well or better with a vertical setup. Here are just a few examples:

• Video Editing: Video editing is perhaps the task that benefits most from a vertical stacked monitor setup. It’s very helpful to have a a monitor above your main timeline monitor that is dedicated solely to displaying the video you are working on. This is doubly true for things like color grading, where you may want to have a separate panel for ensuring the perfect colors are displayed in the end result.
• Making music: The layout of many music editing programs is built around vertical track lists, so lots of music producers find it helpful to spread the window over two vertically stacked monitors.
• Security trading: Trading stocks, bonds, and other securities is a data-heavy business with an insane number of moving parts. Most serious traders like to have as many data feeds and trackers in front of them at once, which means they need workstations with as many monitors as possible. They’ll typically go for horizontal setups first, but it isn’t unusual for them to add verticality to their setups when their desks get crowded.
• Operations and logistics: Similar to security traders, operations and logistics managers often need to keep track of workflows and key performance indicators in real time. Vertical monitors are often used for displaying dashboards and at-a-glance information to help them stay on top of their facilities and spot problems as soon as they emerge.
• Security professionals: Security guards often need to keep an eye on several camera feeds at once, and the best way to do that is to cram as many monitors as possible into their workstations.
• Programming: Some programmers like to see their code stacked vertically, not horizontally. Having the window extended vertically lets them check previous code and spot errors without doing a ton of scrolling. It may only save them a few seconds each time they have to retrace their steps, but those few seconds add up to some serious productivity increases in the long run.

Gaming With Vertical Stacked Monitors

Some power users, especially gamers, like to add a vertically stacked monitor to their setup for added versatility. They’ll often put communication apps like Discord on the top monitor so they can check chats and messages, stick their Twitch stream on the upper monitor to make sure their feed is being recorded and displayed properly, or even have Netflix or YouTube running on the upper monitor while they game.

As far as using dual stacked vertical monitors for displaying your full gameplay goes, we’d almost always highly recommend that you don’t. It just doesn’t work as seamlessly as it can with horizontal monitors. Especially when bezels are accounted for.

Gaming is definitely an area in which horizontal or side monitors reign supreme.

Physical Benefits of Vertical Stacked Monitors

If you work in an office, chances are you spend most of your day crammed into a half cubicle or stuck on the side of a table with barely enough room to move your arms. Workspaces have been shrinking for decades now (even most private offices are basically closets now), and many employees just don’t have the desk space for horizontal multi-monitor setups.

The same goes for remote workers who’ve been forced to convert a corner of their bedrooms or kitchens into ad hoc home offices; sometimes there just isn’t enough space for a horizontal setup.

Vertical Monitor Mount & Setup Recommendations

There are a number of different mounts on the market that will work for a vertical multi-monitor setup. Some are freestanding, others clamp onto your desk or attach to your wall. Some of them offer very limited angle, height, and positional adjustments, others are built with versatile arms that let you reposition your monitors as you please.

Not all of them will work with your particular desk or workstation, but you’re sure to find something that fits your needs.

Here are a few of the top-rated vertical monitor mounts and a quick rundown of how to set them up.

Recommended Freestanding Mount

VIVO Dual Monitor Desk Stand (Click to check current price on Amazon)

This low-cost stand provides a stable mount for two 13 to 30-inch displays. The removable VESA plates make installing your monitors fast and easy, and the sturdy mounts offer an impressive tilt and swivel range. You’ll be able to swivel your monitors 360 degrees, tilt them up to 45 degrees forward and backward, and raise or lower your displays with ease.

Installation

1. Follow the included instructions to assemble the stand itself
2. Take the removable VESA plates and lay them against the back of your monitors
3. Use the included bolts and washers to screw the VESA plates onto the back of your monitors
4. Once the plates are secure, lower the first monitor onto the lower clamp, stopping when the VESA plates and the clamps line up
5. Use the included fasteners to attach the VESA plates to the clamps
6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 with the other monitor and clamp
7. Run monitor cables through the cable management clips built onto the stand, then plug them into their respective displays

And that’s it. Easy, right?

Recommended Fixed Desk Mount

HUANUO Dual Monitor Mount Stand (Click to check current price on Amazon)

This article is actually being posted from a setup using this setup.

If you’re looking for a little more flexibility than a freestanding mount can provide, look no further. This mount’s two gas spring-driven arms let you reposition, tilt, swivel, and rotate your displays whenever and however you want, and their sturdy constructions support monitors as large as 35 inches.

Its base attaches securely to the back of your desk via clamp or bolt-through grommet (both included) and keeps your monitors nice and stable—a big advantage over more precarious freestanding alternatives.

Installation

1. Determine whether you want to use the clamp mount or the grommet
2. Follow the included instructions to attach the base to your desk
3. Attach the arms to the base, then use the included screws and allen key to fasten them in place
4. Attach the monitor plates to the ends of the arms using the included bolts, washers, and allen key
5. Have someone hold the first monitor in place in front of the mounting plate
6. Use the included (appropriately sized) screws to attach the monitor to the mounting plate
7. Repeat steps 5 and 6 with the other arm/monitor
8. Slide monitor cables through built-in cable management holes on the arms
9. Plug in monitors

And there you have it. It’s a little more involved than the freestanding stand, but the added range of motion and versatility is worth it.

Recommended Accessories

The best way to make sure you get the most out of your vertical multi-monitor setup without making your neck ache is to use a standing desk, especially when combined with an arm-based mount.

Let’s say you have a standing desk and attach an arm-based mount to it. You can keep your monitors stacked or adjacent when you’re sitting, then rearrange them into a vertical configuration when you raise the desk to standing height.

That way you get the best of both worlds and won’t go home with a neck ache at the end of the week.

Conclusion

There are some real use-cases and compelling benefits from vertically stacked monitors. Having information vertically stacked makes it easier for a whole range of professionals to do their jobs, and just about any employee in a cramped office can benefit from the space-efficiency of vertically stacked monitors.

There are some definite drawbacks—namely the ergonomics of it all—but it’ll be worth your time to consider a vertical multi-monitor setup for your home or office.

The post Vertical Stacking Monitors: Is It A Bad Idea? (Pros & Cons) appeared first on Cybersided.

The short answer is that triple buffering is a technology that can smooth out video game framerate and reduce screen tearing, but it can also cause notable input lag in some situations. Triple buffering also often requires a fairly powerful PC to run properly.

That’s the abbreviated short-and-sweet. Realistically there’s a lot more to cover to fully understand triple buffering and determine whether or not you should be using it.

This quick guide will walk you through all of the important stuff and help you make the right call.

Introduction

You’ve probably heard the term buffering before, especially if you’re old enough to remember what watching videos on your phone was like back when 3G coverage was spotty and 4G wasn’t even in the planning phases.

If that’s the case, you may be under the impression that buffering is what you call the irritating pauses that happen when your internet connection isn’t fast enough to keep up with your viewing habits. Like a lot of other computing terms, however, buffering means different things in different contexts.

Take “triple buffering,” for example. It can’t mean multiplying those irritating pauses by three or anything like that, so it stands to reason that the “buffering” in “triple buffering” means something else entirely.

Triple buffering isn’t a common term or technique, and it’s only tangentially related to buffering’s colloquial definition. It isn’t a difficult concept to understand, but you need a little background and recontextualizing before it makes sense.

It won’t help much yet in our explanation, but here’s a quick video of a YouTuber trying to demonstrate some visual differences with triple buffering on and off:

What Actually Is a Buffer?

You need to learn to walk before you can run, and you need to learn what one buffer is before you know why you’d want to triple buffer.

In computing terms, a buffer is a piece of your computer’s memory that’s used to shuttle data from one place to another. Buffers can be virtual or have a dedicated physical location in your computer’s RAM, and they can be used for everything from shuttling data from input devices to output devices to moving data between processes. They’re frequently utilized to smooth out dataflows when there’s a difference between the rate data is received and how quickly it’s processed, or if those rates vary from moment to moment.

Think of it like this: Say you have a big garden that needs watering, so you grab your watering can and walk to the nearest spigot. You put it under the tap, fill it up, turn off the tap, and take the watering can to give your thirsty plants a drink. In this case you can think of the spigot as the process generating the data, the watering can as the buffer, and the plants as the process receiving the data.

That garden-watering method gets the job done, but you can’t help getting a little impatient while you wait for the watering can to fill up, and you’re sick of turning the spigot on and off every couple minutes. And sure, it’s only a few seconds at a time, and yeah, you could probably let it go, but the only thing you love more than gardening is efficiency. So you think about it. Irrigation’s too expensive, sprinklers aren’t precise enough, and throwing water balloons at your garden seems like it’d cause a whole bunch of other problems…so what do you do?

Then, suddenly, you’ve got it.

Double Buffering

What’s better than one watering can? Two watering cans.

Suddenly your whole system is a lot more efficient. Now you can fill up one watering can, set the second one under the spigot, and go water your plants while the second can fills up. If you time it right you’ll get back to the spigot right as the second can is full, swap it out with the first one, and go back to watering the plants. No more waiting for the watering can to fill up, no more turning the spigot on and off, and no more wasted time.

That method—trading off between two watering cans—is basically the principle behind double buffering. Double buffering is used in a lot of different areas, but it’s especially useful when it comes to rendering graphics and maintaining a steady framerate.

Computers typically redraw the images on the screen every time they render and display a new frame, and it takes them a split second to replace the old frame with the new one. That split-second delay and constant refreshing can create distracting flickering effects and annoying screen tearing, so programmers have implemented various double buffering techniques to reduce or prevent such visual artifacts entirely.

There are a number of double buffering methods, but let’s stick to one for simplicity’s sake: the page-flip method. This method, much like the gardening scenario above, works by keeping one buffer in the background while the other is at work being displayed on the monitor. As soon as the back buffer is finished drawing it switches places with the front buffer and displays its image on the monitor. Doing this reduces the time between new frames, simultaneously improving efficiency and mostly eliminating flickering and screen tearing. Mostly.

Now you’ve got the gist of buffering and double buffering, so let’s move on to the matter at hand.

Triple Buffering

As you can probably guess by now, triple buffering is basically what you get when you add another buffer to double buffering. Double buffering is a huge improvement for single or non-buffered computer graphics, but it isn’t perfect. Programs using double buffering have to wait for the front and back buffer to switch before they can start drawing the new image, forcing the computer to wait for several milliseconds between frames. Triple buffering was created to reduce or eliminate that downtime.

Triple buffering theoretically eliminates those milliseconds-long delays by adding another back buffer to the mix. That means there’s always one front buffer being displayed on the monitor, a back buffer ready to swap with or copy to the front buffer, and a second back buffer ready to jump in and start getting drawn onto while the other is swapping or copying. The result is (usually) higher, smoother framerates, but it also comes at the cost of added input latency.

You won’t find triple buffering as a togglable setting or built-in amenity in your operating system or in most software. It doesn’t have many uses outside of gaming, and even then you’ll typically only find it tucked away in settings menus for games or graphics cards. It also isn’t recommended for many games; triple buffering can deliver higher, more stable framerates, but the added input latency makes it a bad choice for fast-twitch games like CS:GO, Battlefield 2042, or any games that rely on fast reflexes and quick decision making.

NVIDIA’s Fast Sync feature is one of the most prominent implementations of triple buffering. Fast Sync, intended as an improvement/alternative to V-Sync (we have a whole guide to Fast Sync vs V-Sync), uses triple buffering to smooth out the framerate and all-but eliminate tearing without adding substantial input lag. It does this by taking advantage of the difference between your monitor’s refresh rate and the maximum number of frames your graphics card can render.

Where V-Sync works to prevent tearing by waiting to flip the front and back buffers until your monitor is ready for the next frame (a process that can introduce a lot of input lag), Fast Sync works by constantly rendering frames and displaying the most recent frame in time with the monitor’s refresh rate. In other words: V-Sync slows down your computer’s internal framerate to match your monitor’s refresh rate, while Fast Sync accelerates the internal framerate so there’s always a frame available when the monitor’s ready for the next one.

AMD’s Enhanced Sync technology works very similarly to NVIDIA’s Fast Sync. Both are built to function like better versions of V-Sync, both use three frame buffers, and both work by leveraging the difference between your computer’s maximum framerate and your monitor’s refresh rate.

Like Fast Sync, Enhanced Sync works best when your computer’s maximum internal framerate is significantly higher than your monitor’s refresh rate (NVIDIA recommends a framerate as much as three times the refresh rate), and both prevent screen tearing without adding much input lag. They aren’t exactly the same technologies, of course, but they’re similar enough to be more or less interchangeable.

The Effects of Triple Buffering

Regular triple buffering—the kind you’ll find in some game options menus—tends to add about as much, if not more, lag to the equation than V-Sync, and even Enhanced Sync and Fast Sync add some lag in spite of their more advanced technologies. This means that, like V-Sync, standard triple buffering isn’t recommended for fast-paced games, and some users hesitate to use Enhanced Sync or Fast Sync while they play.

Enhanced Sync and Fast Sync work by making your graphics card render frames as quickly as possible, which means they demand more electricity and put more wear and tear on your hardware than if they were disabled. More electricity and more activity also means more heat generation, so you’ll need to keep an eye on your computer’s internal temperatures if you want to play with either technology enabled.

Final Thoughts & Recommendations

Triple buffering has its pluses and minuses. It can smooth out your framerate and eliminate screen tearing without adding appreciable input lag, but it also requires very powerful hardware to work properly—hardware that will be under quite a lot of stress during your game sessions.

Triple buffering will also add some input lag to your game (though not nearly as much as V-Sync), and that can be a deal-breaker for serious gamers. If you’re more interested in smooth, tear-free gameplay than lightning-fast reactions, however, you may find that triple buffering is exactly the solution you’re looking for.

This kind of setting is similar to what we covered with ray tracing and with SSAA: it can drastically improve graphics, but just as easily come at a steep performance cost.

The post Triple Buffering: What It Is & How It Works (Pros & Cons) appeared first on Cybersided.

Those people are wrong.

The short answer is that 60fps is more widely available and cheaper to run, but is noticeably less smooth than 120fps. Fast-paced, competitive video games will absolutely benefit from 120fps over 60fps, but the extra 60fps won’t matter much for everyday tasks like browsing the internet.

Now granted, you also won’t notice much of a difference when you double your framerate while working in Microsoft Word or Excel, and your Twitter experience probably won’t improve much by jumping from 60 to 120fps, but there are absolutely situations in which increasing your framerate can have real, tangible benefits.

This guide will cover everything you need to know about when you’d benefit 120fps, when 60fps will do just fine, and how your experiences will improve by jumping from 60 to 120fps.

P.S. – If you want to make an even bigger jump in FPS, take a look at our guide to The Pros & Cons of 144hz Monitors (which is the monitor type we recommend for most gamers).

Pros & Cons of 60fps vs 120fps

Framerates have big effects on computing, but they don’t affect every application equally. First, though, let’s look at the pros and cons of 60fps and 120fps in general.

60fps Pros & Cons

60fps has essentially been the standard for years now. Most TVs and monitors came with a 60Hz refresh rate (the max number of frames they can display per second), and PCs were no different. And even though today’s monitors and graphics cards can support much, much higher framerates, many users find 60fps to be just as viable as it ever was.

Here are the most important pros and cons of 60fps versus 120fps:

60fps Pros

• Supported by huge range of hardware
• Most modern computers can support 60fps at 720p or 1080p
• Fast enough for many games, though not ideal
• Much lower system requirements than 120fps

60fps Cons

• Motion isn’t as smooth as 120fps
• Action scenes look blurrier than at 120fps
• More input lag than 120fps
• Puts you at a disadvantage against gamers playing at 120fps

120fps Pros & Cons

120fps is a relatively new arrival on the scene, but it and other three-digit framerates are quickly becoming the standard for users and manufacturers alike. It takes a lot of processing power to render 120 frames per second, but many people—especially gamers—think the additional frames are well worth the investment in more powerful computers and monitors with higher refresh rates, and it isn’t hard to understand why. Fast-paced games look, feel, and play better at higher framerates (we’ll get into that more later), and higher FPS even translates to better performance in many cases.

120fps Pros

• Motion looks smoother than at 60fps
• Reduced blur during action scenes
• Reduced input lag compared to 60fps
• Much less screen tearing and chop

120fps Cons

• Not supported by as many computers and monitors
• Requires more powerful (and expensive) hardware
• Tradeoff between framerate and resolution
• Not necessary for most applications

60fps vs 120fps for Gaming

Gaming is where you’ll really see a difference between 60 and 120fps. Many games perform just fine at 60fps, but framerates of 120fps or higher have become all-but mandatory for first-person shooters like Halo Infinite or Battlefield 2042, racing games like Forza Horizon 5 or Dirt 5, and fighting games like Street Fighter V or Guilty Gear Strive. The effects of higher framerates on fast-paced games are so significant, in fact, that professional gamers prioritize FPS above resolution, graphical effects, and just about every other facet of their gaming experience.

This benchmark YouTuber does a great job of giving you a slow-motion example of how many extra frames 120fps adds and how much smoother the end result can be:

There are a few reasons why FPS is valued so highly among professional gamers, and they’re all worth getting into. Most pro gamers don’t play at 60 or 120fps—instead preferring 144, even 240fps—but you’ll get the same benefits from jumping from 60 to 120fps, just not to the same degree.

The benefits largely fall into three categories: Smoother animations, improved visual effects, and more responsive controls, all of which contribute to improved in-game performance.

The first benefit you’ll get from the jump from 60 to 120fps comes from the relationship between framerate and graphics. When you’re playing an FPS or other fast-paced games at lower framerates, sometimes the animations can look choppy or blurry. These distracting effects are a result of the game moving too fast for the animations to be accurately captured in just 60 frames per second.

Increasing to 120fps lets your computer slice the animations into twice as many frames, which translates directly to smoother, more lifelike animations and character models that don’t look like they’re skipping from place to place.

The next benefit of 120 over 60fps is the reduction or elimination of distracting visual effects like ghosting that can throw off your game. Ghosting—when fast-moving characters leave ghostly trails behind them—occurs when you run games on LCD displays at low framerates and can easily result in missed kills or unnecessary deaths.

Increasing your framerate can seriously improve your game for a couple more reasons. First: latency. Jumping from 60 to 120fps makes your system slice each second into twice as many pieces, which means every animation, every motion, and every input gets rendered twice as quickly. This has a bigger effect than you might think; reducing system latency makes your inputs feel snappier and more responsive and helps you react to other players more quickly, giving you a huge advantage over the lower-FPS competition.

Running games at 120fps instead of 60fps won’t just make your games look and feel better, it’ll also help you get more kills and win more games. You’ll be able to react more quickly when you can see the next frame twice as quickly, you’ll have an easier time tracking enemies and aiming precisely thanks to the smoother animations and more responsive controls, and you’ll have an easier time keeping track of the battlefield without distracting effects like ghosting, blur, and screen tearing.

Framerates have such a big impact on gaming, in fact, that NVIDIA even did a study that found a significant relationship between framerates and kill/death ratios.

So in other words: If you’re a gamer who likes to play first-person shooters, racing games, fighting games, or any other game that requires fast reflexes, you’ll really want to go for 120fps instead of 60. It’ll be more expensive computationally and financially, but it’ll be worth it.

60fps vs 120fps for Everyday Computing

Increasing your framerate from 60 to 120fps won’t make your documents look better or make your spreadsheets any less tedious, but it will make everything feel smoother and more responsive. Doubling the framerate effectively cuts your computer’s response time in half, meaning everything from scrolling down a webpage to moving your cursor to click on a link will feel significantly smoother. Animations like opening and closing windows will also look smoother, and the whole interface will feel more responsive.

Some users won’t notice much of a difference between 60 and 120fps when doing everyday stuff, but almost everyone will notice if you drop from 120 to 60fps. According to some users, the drop from 120 to 60fps makes the monitor’s refreshing more noticeable, the screen looks choppier, and moving the cursor feels less responsive and even kind of laggy.

Though running your computer at 120fps will make your cursor feel more responsive and make everything look and feel smoother, there really isn’t much point in doing everyday stuff in 120fps. Almost everyone will get by just fine with 60fps, and it definitely isn’t worth upgrading your system and monitor so you can browse the internet in 120fps.

What “Frames Per Second” Really Means

“Frames per second” is exactly what it sounds like. Projectors, monitors, and televisions don’t actually display moving pictures; they just create the illusion of motion by displaying a series of still images, or frames, many times per second—essentially the same principle behind old-school flipbooks. And much like old-school flipbooks, the illusion of motion becomes more and more convincing the faster the images fly by.

Movies, shows, and live sports are locked at set framerates due to industry standards and the bandwidth limitations of historic broadcast technologies, but those limits don’t apply to computers. Whether you’re playing a game, working on a spreadsheet, or just staring at the home screen for some reason, the framerate is only limited by your preference and your computer’s processing power.

Final Thoughts & Recommendations

120fps has some big advantages over 60fps. Moving your cursor, opening windows, and scrolling down documents will feel much smoother, and just about every action and animation will look faster and more natural. Bumping up to 120fps requires a big leap in processing power, however, so it probably won’t be worth it to upgrade your system…unless you’re a gamer.

Gaming is the one arena where increasing your framerate is unambiguously worth it. More frames per second translates directly to lower system and input lag and fewer distracting visual effects, not to mention how much easier it is to track and aim at moving characters at higher framerates. You can play slower-paced or turn-based games at 60fps without hurting your performance, but nowadays you need to run faster-paced games at a minimum of 120fps if you want to be competitive.

The post 60fps vs 120fps: Pros & Cons + Real Examples appeared first on Cybersided.

Let’s get the short answer out of the way:

Generally, most users will find 16GB of RAM to be plenty. There aren’t that many applications that can use up 16GB of RAM, let alone 32GB, and 32GB just isn’t necessary outside of a few use-cases. That being said, there are good reasons to opt for 32GB over 16GB, especially if you plan to hold onto your computer for a long time.

Realistically, there are a lot of different scenarios in which you’ll want to make sure you’ve got the right amount of RAM. This quick guide will cover everything you need to know what makes sense for your PC.

P.S. – While you’re on the subject of RAM, we recently dove into the details to cover whether or not RAM brands really matter these days.

Gaming

RAM isn’t the primary concern for most PC gamers. Even visually intensive AAA games only require a minimum of 8GB of RAM, and there are only a handful of titles that can make use of 16GB, so 32GB is overkill for most gamers. There are some exceptions, however, namely simulation games and titles with lots of mods.

Simulation games like Cities: Skylines, Rimworld, and Dwarf Fortress require your computer to keep track of insane numbers of individual elements—people, vehicles, animals, stored materials, etc—all of which get stored in your RAM so your CPU can access it quickly. They won’t eat up much RAM when you first start a new map or scenario, but they’ll demand more and more RAM as your civilization grows.

Mods can also increase the amount of RAM a game requires. Developers typically make games with underpowered gaming PCs and consoles in mind, so they go to great lengths to optimize their titles. They’ll spend months tweaking their code to make it run more efficiently and require fewer resources, often requiring hundreds or thousands of expensive labor hours.

Mod creators, on the other hand, have no such concerns. They’re more interested in adding content to their favorite games than making sure their code runs as efficiently as possible, so their additions tend to be more resource-intensive than they need to be. Adding a bunch of mods to even relatively lightweight games can jack up the resource requirements considerably, and the effect becomes even more pronounced with resource-heavy titles.

If you don’t play many simulation games or use many mods you’re probably fine with 16GB for now, but there’s no harm in future-proofing your rig by adding another 16GB of RAM, especially if you use your gaming PC as a workstation or use it for video editing or graphic design.

P.S. – If you’re wondering about how the size of individual RAM sticks affects the whole process, take a look at our guide to 4x8GB vs 2x16GB RAM.

Everyday Computing

You’re probably thinking something along the lines of “16GB is plenty for most stuff, right?” And you’re right…mostly. It’s true that most basic computing tasks—navigating the desktop, managing files, etc—don’t take up much RAM, but that isn’t true for other applications you’d consider to be relatively basic.

Take internet browsers for example: As anyone who used Google Chrome back in the day can tell you, your internet browser will consume just about as much RAM as you let it, though it depends on how many tabs you have open and what websites you’re using.

You can probably figure this out intuitively, but more complex websites take up more RAM than simpler ones. Watching a show on Hulu, for instance, will consume a lot more RAM than scrolling through a blog or reading an article on a news site.

You can check on how much RAM each site uses by opening your task manager (Ctrl + Shft + Esc) and looking at the column for memory usage. You might be surprised what you see.

16GB of RAM will be plenty for most everyday computing stuff, but 32GB will let you keep more tabs open and keep more programs running at the same time. It’s up to you, and it’s probably a safe bet that websites will only demand more and more RAM as time goes by.

Professional Multimedia Applications (Video Editing & Graphic Design)

This is a relatively broad category that includes video and photo editing applications like Adobe Premiere and Photoshop, audio editing programs like Ableton Live, and 3D modeling programs like Blender. These RAM-hungry applications require your computer to hold onto and quickly switch between lots of large files, and the required RAM tends to skyrocket as the projects get bigger.

Many professional graphic designers, video editors, and audio producers consider 16GB of RAM to be the bare minimum for a functional workstation. Anything less will make working on all but the smallest projects a complete pain in the neck; every click and drag will make your computer stutter, every added element will make your computer freeze until it catches up, and rendering your finished product will take long enough to tick off even the most patient professionals.

You might be able to get away with 16GB of RAM for now, but programs and projects are only going to get more complex and demanding in the future. So even if you don’t need all 32GB of RAM now, it’s still a good idea to invest in the extra capacity.

Office Work

Standard office work—writing documents, sending emails, working on spreadsheets, running reports, etc—is one area which can benefit greatly from more RAM.

If you’ve ever worked in Excel, for example, you know that spreadsheets can balloon in complexity and resource-intensiveness very quickly, and your standard office computer with 8GB of RAM will grind to a halt every time you change a formula or adjust a graph. More RAM will help your computer’s CPU handle big spreadsheets more efficiently, and that efficiency will help you get your work done more quickly.

Putting 32GB of RAM in your work machine will also make it easier to multitask: The extra RAM will help your computer manage multiple programs at the same time, so you’ll be able to check Outlook, answer messages on Slack, and work on a PowerPoint deck while you wait for a report to process or tinker with a spreadsheet. That extra productivity is reason enough to invest in 32GB of RAM for your work machine.

Pros & Cons of 16GB & 32GB RAM

16GB

Going with 16GB is a pretty safe bet for most users. It’s cheaper than 32GB (obviously), it’s more than enough for most applications, and there are very few games that can use 16GB of RAM, let alone require that much.

The downside of going with 16GB is that you’ll be sort of hamstrung if you want to use heavy-duty professional programs like Excel, Adobe Premier, Ableton Live, and Blender. Programs like these will gobble up all your available RAM and still want more, and you may experience some serious slowdowns when working on big projects.

32GB

The upsides and downsides of 32GB of RAM are pretty much the opposite of 16GB. You’ll have way more RAM capacity than you need for most applications and almost all games, and as of now there’s no real reason to have that much RAM outside of a few use cases.

On the other hand, having 32GB of RAM will help boost your productivity if you’re working in heavy-duty professional graphic or audio design applications, and that alone may be worth the price of admission.

You’ll also be future-proofing your PC in case programs become significantly more demanding in the future, and there’s really no downside to having too much RAM. It’ll just be sitting there, unused, most of the time, but you’ll be glad to have it when it’s time to edit a big video project or put together a complex spreadsheet.

Understanding How RAM Works

RAM, or random-access memory, is a special type of memory found in every computer, tablet, and smartphone. Unlike hard drives or solid-state drives, which provide permanent storage for files and programs, RAM only holds onto pertinent program data for as long as your CPU needs it.

There’s a good reason computers are designed with both temporary and permanent storage, and it’s actually pretty simple: RAM is much faster than hard drives or their speedier solid-state drive cousins.

Without RAM your computer would have to search through your main storage every time it needed to find a program file, load data, or even open a new tab in your internet browser, which would slow everything down to a crawl.

RAM is essentially a computational compromise; it might not be necessary if the main storage could keep up with your CPU, but until the main storage catches up RAM remains an absolute necessity for today’s computers.

The post 16GB vs 32GB RAM (Pros, Cons & Which Performs Best) appeared first on Cybersided.

Generally, EVGA and GIGABYTE products both feature good build quality. However, EVGA offers superior support, warranties, and customer service, while GIGABYTE offers better variety throughout its product lines. For GPUs, EVGA only specializes in NVIDIA cards, while GIGABYTE makes both NVIDIA and AMD cards.

That’s the way-too-short answer. Realistically, there are lots of additional details to cover when comparing similar products between these two.

So which company is better, EVGA or GIGABYTE? Whose specific products are better? Who should you look to when it’s time to start thinking about your next build?

From GPUs to motherboards, warranties to customer service, we’ve done all of the heavy lifting to help you determine which of these heavyweights hits the hardest.

Clearly, EVGA and GIGABYTE are hardware competitors with plenty in common. Both have long, storied histories, both offer a variety of products in a wide range of categories, and both have techy names spelled in all caps.

Having a lot in common isn’t always a good thing, however, as both companies’ product offerings overlap in a few critical arenas. And, like most arenas, only one entrant can claim victory at the end of the day.

EVGA’s Background

It didn’t take EVGA very long to rise to the top. Established in 1999, the California-based computer hardware manufacturer quickly demonstrated its potential as one of the best producers of NVIDIA-based graphics cards and NVIDIA reference designed motherboards.

EVGA was one of the first firms to introduce factory overclocked GPUs, motherboards capable of supporting four GPUs running in SLI, and GPUs capable of running in 4-way SLI, and that’s just the start. EVGA quickly expanded into the Intel chipset-based motherboard business (starting with their X58 SLI motherboard in 2009), but they didn’t stop there.

EVGA has spent the last decade polishing its processes, building on its innovations, and expanding its product line. Their offering has grown to include power supplies, liquid coolers, computer cases, and other components, computer accessories like gaming mice and keyboards, and they’ve even dabbled in premade tablet computers and gaming laptops.

While not every single one their newer products have been as successful as they would have liked, EVGA’s willingness to take risks and expand their lineup speaks to the company’s ambition and marks them as one of the most dynamic firms in the market.

As a private company, EVGA doesn’t make much financial or organizational data public, but the available information paints a picture of an established company with lots of room to grow.

EVGA has eight different locations around the world and at least 250 employees, and its wide product offering suggests a long list of manufacturing partners and suppliers from whom EVGA sources many of their products.

GIGABYTE’s Background

GIGABYTE may have been founded way back in 1986, but its eyes have always been on the future. The first clue is in its name: a gigabyte may seem insignificant today, but in the 80s the idea of consumer electronics able to store a billion bytes was the stuff of science fiction.

Under the leadership of Pei-Cheng Yeh, the company’s founder and current chairman, GIGABYTE has grown from a boutique computer hardware firm into one of, if not the world’s biggest motherboard producers and has expanded its scope to a range of products and solutions in the consumer, enterprise, and industry spaces.

Motherboards may be their bread and butter, but GIGABYTE has its eyes set on the whole bakery. Over the years they’ve entered the consumer electronics market with desktops, tablets, ultrabooks, mobile phones, and even PDAs, produced and sold components like optical drives, monitors, mice, keyboards, cooling systems, power supplies, and cases, and even catered to enterprise clients with lines of server motherboards, server racks, networking equipment.

Like EVGA, GIGABYTE’s ventures and expanded inventories haven’t all paid off, but GIGABYTE’s core business and global reach are more than capable of absorbing the odd risk that doesn’t pay off.

Unlike EVGA, GIGABYTE is a publicly traded company (traded on the Taiwan Stock Exchange), so they’ve had to make a lot of their financial and operational information a matter of public record. On top of their main business, GIGABYTE operates at least one subsidiary company (Aorus), and their various facilities, offices, and fabricators employ over 2,600 employees.

All this size and scope translates to a hefty balance sheet for GIGABYTE, with the company reporting revenues of NT$84 billion (about $304 million) for fiscal year 2020.

Product Variety

Product Variety Winner: GIGABYTE

EVGA and GIGABYTE have produced and sold many of the same types of products in the past, but their current product offerings only overlap in a few key areas: GPUs, motherboards, mice, and keyboards. EVGA’s comparably smaller operation and shorter history put it at a bit of a disadvantage—especially in the motherboard category.

As you can see from quick can of EVGA’s website and GIGABYTE’s website, it’s abundantly clear that GIGABYTE dominates the variety debate in just about every way possible.

A quick note: The semiconductor/GPU shortage threw the whole market into chaos. Many GPUs are/were sold out, listed at outrageous markups, or both, and some have been pulled from online listings altogether until the supply chain returns to normal. This, naturally, makes it nigh impossible to do accurate price comparisons between the two companies’ GPUs, so you won’t find much information about price points in this article.

Customer Support

Best Customer Support Winner: EVGA, by a large margin

If you live in America or another English-speaking country you’ll have a better time with EVGA’s customer service than with GIGABYTE’s. EVGA is an American company with an American support staff, which can be very helpful when you’re trying to work out an issue with a product.

You’d be hard-pressed to find accounts of bad experiences with EVGA’s customer service, and, though GIGABYTE’s service isn’t necessarily the industry’s worst, EVGA’s excellence in the arena is more than enough to overwhelm GIGABYTE’s sometimes spotty and hard to reach customer service.

Warranties

Best Warranties Winner: EVGA

Both EVGA’s warranty and GIGABYTE’s warranty list 3-year warranties on their sites for all GPU purchases. Their policies are pretty much boilerplate; the companies guarantee they’ll repair or replace your GPU if it has some kind of defect in material or workmanship that causes your graphics card to crap out within three years of purchase.

They seem pretty much even…until you hit a little clause in EVGA’s agreement: a Transferable Limited Warranty clause. It sounds boring (and it is) but it means you can sell your GPU to someone else and transfer the warranty to them. This is a small but important difference between the two firms’ policies, and it’s enough to give EVGA the win.

Customer Reviews

Best Reviews Winner: EVGA

Customer reviews across the board say pretty much what’s been covered above: EVGA’s selection is small and their cooling systems aren’t as impressive as GIGABYTE’s, but their customer service and warranty are so good they almost make up for EVGA’s deficits in other areas.

The two companies’ respective GPUs perform very similarly, are made with similar quality materials, and last about the same amount of time, so it’s up to you whether you’re more interested in a larger variety or in a responsive company that places a higher priority on the customer.

GPUs

When a company “manufactures” graphics cards, they aren’t actually building and assembling all the components needed to make a functioning graphics card. We covered this at length in our guide to EVGA vs NVIDIA.

We also recently did a full comparison of EVGA vs ZOTAC, who both only overlap in the GPU market.

Instead, most companies (with the exception of NVIDIA and AMD) buy all the GPUs important bits from either NVIDIA or AMD, slap on some proprietary cooling tech or put it in some fancy form factor or configuration, and then sell the finished products under their own brand.

This means there won’t be much of a difference in performance in graphics cards from different companies, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t differences between any two GPU “manufacturers’” products.

Even if one’s cards don’t have a huge performance or technological advantage over the other’s, there are still differences in customer service, reviews, selection, and cooling systems.

If you’re interested, here’s a full list of EVGA GPUs.

And here’s a full list of GIGABYTE GPUs.

To make things more straightforward, we split the comparison into low, mid, and high-end GPUs.

Low End GPUs

Low End GPU Winner: GIGABYTE

EVGA doesn’t have a very large selection of GeForce 200, 700, or 10 Series GPUs. The different versions they offer are just as barebones as their selection; you won’t find any fancy features or advanced cooling systems on these cards. EVGA reserves those for their pricier GPUs.

GIGABYTE, on the other hand, clocks in with an incredible combined total of three hundred different versions of NVIDIA GeForce 200, 400, 600, 700, 900, and 10 Series GPUs—and that’s not including the fifty versions of lower-powered AMD cards they carry.

This round goes to GIGABYTE based on numbers alone. Not only do they carry both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, they offer nearly sixty times as many varieties as EVGA.

Mid-to-Upper Range GPUs

Mid Range GPU Winner: GIGABYTE

GIGABYTE wins this round as well. Their selection of midrange NVIDIA cards is massive, and their selection of midrange AMD cards is…there. EVGA makes a decent enough showing, but there’s no arguing with the sheer number of models and versions that GIGABYTE has on offer.

High-End GPUs

High-End GPU Winner: GIGABYTE

And now we get to the big boys. These GPUs are where we really start seeing some differences in form factor and cooling systems, the latter of which can have a bigger impact on your GPU’s performance than you may think.

GIGABYTE comes out on top once again. Their massive selection of high-end NVIDIA and AMD GPUs absolutely dwarfs EVGA’s lineup, and it even has a range of cooling options that match or exceed EVGA’s own proprietary cooling systems.

GIGABYTE definitely wins in terms of selection, variety, and even cooling systems.

Motherboards

Motherboard Winner: GIGABYTE

This will be a quick comparison. Unlike our GIGBABYTE vs MSI comparison, there’s not a lot to talk about here.

EVGA may have made its bones building motherboards, but it seems like the company’s pretty much moved on from the space, as they currently only offer four motherboards on their website.

GIGABYTE, on the other hand, has several different lines of motherboards designed for both individual and enterprise customers. Their AORUS Gaming, GIGABYTE Gaming, and Ultra Durable lines include nearly 1,000 different models in total, and their Embeded/IoT and Server/Workstation lines add another 60+ models to the tally.

Selection might not be everything, but there’s no real evidence that suggests GIGABYTE’s motherboards are inferior to EVGA’s current selection. GIGABYTE dominates EVGA in this category.

Keyboards, Mice & Other Peripherals

Mice, Eyboards, & Other Peripherals Winner: NEITHER

Once again, GIGABYTE offers a much larger selection of gaming mice and keyboards than EVGA, and once again their respective products are quite comparable in terms of functionality, price, and form factor.

But here’s the kicker: Neither EVGA’s or GIGABYTE’s gaming mice or keyboards come close to being the best in the market. There isn’t one reputable website that’s listed either of their peripherals as some of the best available in 2021 or 2022, which pretty much tells you that both companies are equally bad at making and selling mice and keyboards.

Final Thoughts & Recommendations

If EVGA is David, GIGABYTE is Goliath. EVGA’s business is much smaller and more focused, and their emphasis on the North American/English-speaking market make them a much better choice for people anticipating a need for customer support in the future.

GIGABYTE is a fine company with a long history and an absolutely massive product offering, but their subpar warranties and customer service may be a dealbreaker if forced to choose between buying a similar product from either company.

The computer hardware market is…weird. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of manufacturers and resellers for everything from computer cases to graphics cards, but there’s surprisingly little variation between the products they sell.

That there are really only two core GPU manufacturers (NVIDIA and AMD) always makes things interesting, as it seems like every other company claims to produce their own GPUs.

And while that’s technically true—each GPU “manufacturer” buys the tech from NVIDIA or AMD and adds proprietary features to make the cards their own—no amount of advanced cooling systems or specialized form factors will change the fact that they’re all built on the same underlying technology.

Repackaging and reselling other companies’ products is incredibly common in the computer hardware market, which often makes it a chore to determine which firm offers the best tech.

The post EVGA vs GIGABYTE: Full Head-to-Head Comparison (Pros & Cons) appeared first on Cybersided.

Both of these components are absolutely critical for a PC, but it’s not always easy to determine which one is most important.

It’s also not easy to determine which one may be holding your system back from its full potential, whether you’re using it for gaming, editing, or daily work.

Generally, your CPU should be upgraded before your GPU if you notice stuttering during games or you’re regularly at 100% CPU usage during tasks. For a computer that simply struggles with rendering graphics of visually intensive games, a GPU upgrade should come first.

That’s the way-too-short answer. Realistically, there’s a lot more nuance to consider.

There are some great ways to make this a straightforward decision. We’ll dive in deeper to give you all of the steps and information you need to make the right call.

Introduction

Your PC is due for an upgrade. In the past, it may have been an absolute beast. Maybe it could handle the most graphically intensive games no problem—it never met a graphics slider it couldn’t pull all the way up.

But time keeps pushing forward, technology keeps improving, and you’ve watched those graphics sliders tick left over and over until the settings are so low you might as well be playing on console. It’s time.

There are two obvious candidates when it comes to upgrading your computer: the central processing unit (CPU) and the graphics processing unit (GPU). Both are critical components, the backbones of your rig. Both are showing their age…and both will be expensive to upgrade.

Let’s assume you don’t want to drop two paychecks on upgrading both your CPU and GPU at the same time. It’s going to be one or the other, but it isn’t an easy decision to make.

First you need to figure out whether it’s your CPU or GPU that’s holding your system back, then you need to think about which one would give you a bigger performance boost (not necessarily the same thing), and then you need to think about cost.

You’ll need to think about how long each part will last, and how long they’ll be powerful enough to run the games you want to play. You’ll also need to think about how a new part will impact the rest of your system.

Also, keep in mind that, if you are using a laptop, upgrading your GPU (or CPU) may be borderline impossible.

How to Identify CPU or GPU Bottleneck

The first step to making the right decision is to find out whether your CPU or your GPU is holding you back. You can figure this out in a couple ways.

Test #1

Play a game. Something fast-moving and visually impressive.

If your GPU can’t render the graphics at the settings you want, then chances are you need a new GPU. If, on the other hand, your GPU renders the graphics just fine, but the game keeps stuttering when there’s a lot going on, then chances are your CPU is to blame.

This isn’t conclusive enough to make a 100% confident decision, but this is the best, most simple way to start.

P.S. – If you’re wondering how long your GPU should last (and if it’s on its last leg), take a look at our guide to GPU lifespan. If you suspect your CPU may be having issues, check out our guide to the signs, symptoms, and test for a dying CPU.

Test #2

Open a game with a setting that lets you see the current CPU and GPU usage. You should see it in the options menu (not every game has this). Now start playing, but keep an eye on the CPU and GPU usage.

If your GPU is constantly at 100% usage while your CPU is barely breaking a sweat, that means your GPU is struggling to keep up with your CPU. If your GPU isn’t even at 50% usage while your CPU stays around 100%, on the other hand, your CPU probably isn’t powerful enough to keep up with your GPU.

Again, this isn’t quite conclusive yet. Different programs use your computer’s components very differently, so data from a single game won’t tell you the whole story.

Additional Steps

You’ll want to run a few different games and some other programs to see if a pattern emerges.

It’s also a good idea to pull up the Task Manager (press Ctrl + Shift + Esc) and keep an eye on your hardware’s performance while you play; it’ll give you the same information as the in-game display plus readouts on memory and disc usage.

Who knows, maybe you just need some more RAM or a new storage drive (go for a solid state drive, they’re worth it).

These tests should give you a fairly decent idea of what’s holding your computer back.

But let’s say your GPU and CPU are equally underpowered or pretty close in terms of power and performance. How do you decide which part to replace when the answer isn’t obvious?

Let’s start with what you can expect from a new GPU and a new CPU.

Performance Gains from a New CPU or GPU

Upgrading either your CPU or GPU will boost your computer’s performance in very different ways, and you should take these differences into account while you consider your options.

New CPU Performance

If your CPU is more than a couple years old, buying a new one will come with either a significant boost in clock speed, additional cores, or both. Clock speed, measured in gigahertz (GHz), represents the number of instructions a CPU can execute per second. A higher clock speed means a CPU can process instructions more quickly, which translates directly to a smoother and snappier user experience.

If your current CPU is holding your GPU back, chances are that your GPU can take instructions more quickly than your CPU can distribute them. You’ll need a model with a higher clock speed to keep up with your GPU’s potential.

Upgrading to a CPU with more cores, on the other hand, will improve your user experience in a slightly different way. We recently compared 4-core & 6-core CPU’s, so that may be a good starting read if you’re wondering how cores actually affect performance.

While early CPUs processed instructions one after another on a single processor, modern CPUs divide up the work between two, four, or more smaller processors called cores. This can lead to a significant boost in performance if the programs you’re using are designed to work on multicore systems.

More and more programs and games are being designed to utilize multiple cores, but there are still a few holdouts that put all the work on a single core.

If your most frequently used programs don’t support multicore systems (check the Performance tab in Task Manager to see how the programs distribute work among your CPU’s cores), you’ll probably be best off getting a CPU with fewer, faster cores. If your most frequently used programs do support multicore systems, on the other hand, your best bet will be upgrading to a CPU with more, slightly slower cores.

New GPU Performance

If your GPU is getting up there in years, upgrading to a new one will improve nearly every aspect of your gaming experience. A newer, more powerful GPU will have more VRAM and be able to render much more detailed graphics than your old one, and the extra power will let you run games at significantly higher framerates. In other words, a new GPU will make games look better, run better, and feel better.

A new GPU won’t just help with games. It’ll eliminate stuttering in most video applications, for example, and it’ll make clunky video editing software run more smoothly and render big projects much more quickly.

A new GPU can also help you up your productivity if you work with machine learning, game design, CAD, or any kind of graphic design. Basically, if you work with anything that needs to be designed or rendered, a new GPU will help you get your work done faster.

Now that you know what a new CPU and GPU would do for your system’s performance, let’s look at what they’d do to your setup.

Additional Important Things You’ll Need to Consider

What You’ll Need with a New CPU

Upgrading your CPU is seldom a straightforward affair. Your current CPU has the same socket type as your motherboard, and your motherboard has a chipset that’s compatible with your current CPU. That probably won’t be the case if you just buy a new CPU.

CPUs and motherboards tend to evolve together, and they do so quickly enough that a new CPU probably won’t be compatible with a motherboard that’s even a few years old. And even if your new CPU fits your motherboard’s sockets, your motherboard probably won’t have the right chipset to support all of the new CPU’s functions.

An older chipset may not support overclocking (we’ve got a guide on how to tell if your CPU can be overclocked), for instance, or it may slow down data flows and restrict your CPU’s performance.

Motherboards last a long time (as we also detailed in our guide to motherboard lifespan) and are the backbone of the rest of your components, so make sure to do your research before you buy a new one.

You’ll also want to take a moment to assess your PC’s cooling systems. If you’re going to be seriously beefing up your system’s power, you’re also going to be increasing heat. It might be a good time to consider upgrading your CPU fans and/or chassis fans.

IMPORTANT: If you end up settling on a new CPU, do not forget to use a good thermal paste when you install it. Thermal paste is easily overlooked, but the health of your system can depend on it.

What You’ll Need with a New GPU

This is an easy one. GPUs typically slot right into your motherboard’s open PCIe slots, so you’re practically good to go as long as your motherboard has enough PCIe slots of the same generation as your new GPU. It might take less than an hour to get your new GPU installed and configured.

Before you buy your new GPU, however, you should check its power requirements. You probably bought (or your PC came with) a power supply for your computer’s old configuration, and newer GPUs tend to draw more power than older models. New power supplies are relatively cheap and very easy to install, so it shouldn’t be too much trouble even if you need a new one.

The guides we’ve already linked above should be really helpful for the upgrading process, but we’d also recommend evaluating/adjusting your fan curves if you add new hardware.

Final Thoughts

Whether to upgrade your CPU or GPU first can be a tough question. You need to determine which one’s underpowered, which new CPU or GPU to buy, and what other parts you might need to upgrade at the same time.

This guide guide should be a great start (and even an end, hopefully) to the process of making a decision, but make sure to do more research on your own before you open your wallet.

The post Should You Upgrade Your GPU or CPU First? (How to Decide) appeared first on Cybersided.

You can definitely run 1080p on a 1440p monitor, but image quality will be negatively impacted. The amount of blur, visual artifacts, etc will depend the quality of a monitor’s scalers. However, downscaling to 1080p on a 1440p monitor will increase video game framerate and performance.

That’s the short answer, but there are a number of important things to consider when trying to make sure everything looks good.

This quick guide will cover everything you need to know about how the downscaling will look, its pros/cons, and how it all works.

How Does 1080p Look on a 1440p Monitor?

You’ll get an okay image when you set a 1440p monitor to 1080p, but it’s certainly not ideal. A couple factors will determine how good a 1080p image looks on a 1440p display. Your monitor’s size will play a big part, along with scalers.

Monitor Size

Pixels get spread out on bigger screens, and you’ll see more blur and less detail as the screen’s size increases. You’ll still notice some issues on a smaller monitor, but the higher pixel density will help make those issues less noticeable.

For example, 1080p looks way better on a 24-inch monitor than it will on a 32-inch monitor.

Monitor Scalers

The next factor is your computer and/or monitor’s scalers. Scalers are programs that enlarge or shrink images to fit (nonnative) resolutions, and the quality of your monitor and/or computer’s scalers can play a big role in how a scaled image looks on the screen.

A good set of scalers can make upscaled or downscaled images look almost as good as on a screen with a matching resolution. A bad set of scalers will just upscale or downscale the image without trying to correct any blur or visual artifacts.

Pixel Mapping

Finally, the image quality will depend on whether you choose to go scale the image up or go for a 1:1 pixel map.

Pixel mapping—literally carving out a 1080p-sized chunk of your screen—will make a 1080p image look just as good as it would on a 1080p screen, but it’ll also leave big black bands of empty space around the picture. It’s a great option…if you don’t mind all the wasted screen space.

Most users find those black bars ugly or distracting, so you’ll only want to go for a 1:1 pixel map if you aren’t satisfied with the results of upscaling it to fit in 1440p.

Benefits of 1080p on a 1440p Monitor

Running 1080p on a 1440p display—or at least having the option—can be advantageous in a few situations: Gaming, streaming, and work.

Gaming

Gaming, like anything else, requires tradeoffs. You probably know this already if you’re a PC gamer. Sometimes you need to turn down the graphics settings and turn off antialiasing to get a new game to run on an old system, or maybe you’ve turned off every lighting setting and water effect so you could squeeze out a few more frames per second (FPS). This situation is no different.

You already need a reasonably powerful computer (or at least one with a graphics card) to play games at 30 to 60 FPS in 1080p, and it’s nearly impossible to play games in 4K resolution at anything above 30 FPS. While 1440p isn’t as detailed and demanding as 4K, it’s still substantially more taxing than 1080p.

Note: We have a full guide comparing the pros and cons between opting for a high-refresh-rate monitor or a high-resolution 4k monitor. It covers everything you need to know about balancing frame rate and image quality/resolution.

You’ll need a powerful rig with an equally powerful GPU to run games in 1440p at 30 FPS, let alone at 60, 120, 144, and higher. This becomes doubly true when you’re playing fast-paced games with lots of onscreen action and special effects.

Luckily there’s a compromise: Drop the resolution from 1440p to 1080p and watch your framerate monitor climb into the triple digits. You could even go to 720p (or 900p) in some situations.

Playing at 1080p on a 1440p monitor has both big upsides and downsides. As stated above, the lower resolution will let you hit higher framerates without making your computer burst into flame, and 1080p is plenty detailed for most games, but you will have to put up with the graphical downsides that come from downscaling.

This might not matter if you don’t mind slightly blurry images, fuzzier details, but you may find that the downscaling process makes text hard or impossible to read, and your display’s scalers may add input lag that can throw off your game.

In spite of the downsides, however, having the option to play in 1440p, 1080p, or lower resolutions gives you a lot of flexibility that you wouldn’t have on a 1080p monitor. It’s up to you whether or not that flexibility is worth it.

Streaming

You can play a lot of games in 1440p, but that’s not as true when it comes to streaming content. Not much content is available in anything above 1080p on the big streaming services, and the bandwidth required to stream in 1440p and above far outstrips what many people’s connections can provide.

A monitor with native 1440p resolution gives you the option of downscaling to 1080p or lower for streaming content while still letting you watch Blu-rays in 1440p.

Streaming on Twitch or other sites also benefit from this arrangement. Streaming in 1440p, 4K, or higher isn’t allowed on many services, and even fewer viewers will have the bandwidth available to watch content in such high resolutions. Many streamers choose to upload their footage in 1080p or lower for precisely this reason.

And while you could technically play in 1440p and upload footage in 1080p, you’ll probably want to play in the same resolution your viewers see. That way you’ll see exactly what your viewers see, and you’ll be able to run your games at higher framerates (which will help you play better and look cooler for your fans).

Work

Running 1080p on a 1440p display won’t help boost your productivity, but having a 1440p display will. Many people have big monitors for the same reason people have multi-monitor setups: More space.

The increased detail of 1440p will let you make out fine details that you couldn’t see on 1080p or lower, so you’ll be able to have a bunch of windows onscreen at once without worrying about illegible text, fuzzy charts, or emails you have to zoom in to 150% to read.

Being able to drop from 1440p to 1080p can also help you conserve processing power when your computer is struggling to handle a big spreadsheet or finish rendering a project. Faster processing means more productivity, and more productivity means you can finish work and hop onto your favorite game that much sooner. This isn’t that big a benefit, but sometimes every little big helps.

Drawbacks of 1080p on a 1440p Monitor

There are only a couple big downsides to downscaling to 1080p on a 1440p monitor, and they’ve been fairly well covered above.

To recap, though, downscaling can: Make the picture look worse, introduce visual artifacts, cause text and details to look blurry, and possibly add input lag that could throw off your game. If you’re okay with all that then by all means, go for it.

How Downscaling Will Affect Your PC

Every modern screen is comprised of a certain number of pixels—tiny light-emitting elements that turn on, off, and change color as needed—arranged in rows and columns.

A screen’s resolution is determined by the number of pixels it has, and most resolutions are named after the number of rows of pixels on the screen. That means a screen with native 1080p resolution has 1,080 rows of pixels, a screen with native 1440p has 1,440 rows of pixels, and so on.

This is true of screens of any size, so a 32-inch display with 1080p resolution has exactly the same number of pixels as a 50-inch display with native 1080p. It’s also the reason the picture on bigger displays seem a bit less detailed than their smaller cousins; there are fewer pixels per square inch (PPI) on a 50-inch display than on a 32-inch, and more pixels mean more detail.

The jump from 1080p to 1440p is bigger than you may think.

A 1080p display has 2,073,600 pixels (1,080 rows, 1,920 columns), while a 1440p screen has 3,686,400 (1,440 rows, 2,560 columns). That means a 1440p display has about 76% more pixels than a 1080p display, which translates to a 76% jump in detail and processing power required.

The same is also true going the other way: Running 1080p on a 1440p monitor only requires about 57% of the monitor’s pixels and, consequently, the processing power needed to render images in 1440p. So how do you fit a 1080p image on a 1440p screen?

Your computer uses either your CPU or your graphics card to render images, then either send them to your display(s) or directly to the internet if you’re streaming.

Seems straightforward enough, but only if the signal your computer is outputting is in the same resolution (or at least divides evenly into) as your monitor.

For example, let’s say you want to run a game at 1080p on a 1440p monitor. Your monitor has to find a way to display the 1080p images on a screen with 76% more pixels, so it uses algorithms called “video scalers” to transpose the 1080p images onto its 1440p screen.

How video scalers work is complicated, but the long and short of it is that video scalers use complex algorithms to make 1080p images fit on your 1440p display. This process is called “downscaling.”

Video scaling is very clever and complex, but it isn’t perfect. Downscaling can make the picture look blurry and stretched-out, and the fact that 1080p doesn’t divide evenly into 1440p makes it even harder for the video scalers to do their job.

If 1440p was twice as big as 1080p, for instance, the scaler could just double the size of the image and call it a day. Unfortunately 1440p is only 76% bigger than 1080p, so the scaler won’t be able to precisely transpose the 1080p image onto the 1440p screen.

That means there’s a bigger risk of blur and other visual artifacts that make the picture look substantially worse.

Final Tips & Recommendations

It’s absolutely possible to downscale to 1080p on a 1440p monitor. Video scalers built into your monitor and/or GPU will automatically make the image fit the screen, and many video scalers do a pretty good job of making the image look almost as good as it would on a screen with the same native resolution.

Other video scalers aren’t quite as sophisticated, however, so it’s worth looking into which ones your hardware use before you change your settings.

Hopefully this guide has helped you understand what downscaling looks like, how it works, and its upsides and downsides in a context that matters to you.

So do some research, weigh your options, and experiment until you find the solution that’s right for you!

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