what determines computer speed?

Answer 1

The most important factors in determining noticable computer speed is the programs you are running. You will notice no difference between an old IBM PC and a brand new computer if you want to find the answer to 10*20.

Having a faster processor will only increase the performance of programs that are heavily CPU dependent. For instance, a faster processor will give a speed boost for cryptography or video rendering. However, processor specific optimizations can often increase speed even more than an extra 1GHz or so.

Having more RAM gives a performance boost when dealing with large amounts of memory and caching. However, once you have more RAM than you can use, adding more will not help.

Having faster RAM provides better performance for tasks that repeatedly save and retrieve variables. But more effective caching and/or more CPU cache can sometimes make things even faster (with slow RAM).

A faster hard drive usually means that disk reads and writes will be faster. Likewise, copying large files can be much faster. But at a certain point, the disk cannot be any faster without a faster interface.

Adding hardware acceleration for many tasks will give a better performance boost than doubling your CPU speed and RAM. A 1GHz CPU with 256MB RAM and hardware cryptography acceleration will encrypt and decrypt files faster than a system with a 2GHz CPU and 512MB RAM. The latter system with the hardware cryptography acceleration might be no faster than the former for those purposes.


If you are going to be doing every day tasks with your computer, the two major factors to consider are CPU speed and amount of RAM. If you want to play games or watch large movies, you should also look into a video card with more memory. If you are a serious gamer, you'll want a graphics card with a faster GPU (and a monitor with a faster refresh rate). If you are an audiophile, you might want an audio card with full hardware acceleration support for complex aural rendering.

If you want to use your computer as an entertainment center, you will want more hardware acceleration support on your graphics cards. A faster GPU isn't as interesting as whether the card has full MPEG-4 encoding/decoding support and what connectors it has.

But beyond that, your system speed is highly dependent on your operating system. It has been demonstrated that system performance does not increase consistently using certain operating systems (namely Windows). With such OSes, you might eventually reach a plateua where adding a faster CPU, more RAM, etc., will not actually have any impact on performance.

Answer 2

well there are many things that affect computer speed, i've seen people say processors, ram, etc. these awnsers are correct in partally, but there are many things that change computer speed, such as the north bridge, the south bridge, clock speed, multiplyer, Temprature is a big one 2, the hotter a system gets the slower it gets, and also the more damage that can be caused, also another thing that affects the speed of a computer is the applications that you are running and the amount of space they require not only on the hard drive but across the system, there is no one thing that affects speed in a computer as its the computer as a whole that functions together to make your speed both software and hardware if you have a particular thing that your looking to do and its going to be the main purpose for the system its best to get a system that is designed or simi designed for that purpose, kinda like a gaming system usually sucks for server purposes, and something used for data conversion and entry sucks for gaming, if you would like to discuss what your trying to do with the computer i can give you a bit more indepts analisys of what you would want to look for or what to avoid

Answer 3

Your question doesn't make much sense. In reality, the overall processing speed is determined by the slowest link in the computer, whether it be the front size bus, the CPU, or the RAM latency. The CPU cache size also plays a part in it. The speed also depends on the application you are using and whether it uses lots of data or just calculations.

Answer 4

By speed I assume you mean how fast it seems.
This is caused by having a fast enough processor, enough ram, and a harddrive which runs at a good rpm usually 7200rpm for dekstops.
Various other things software side determine it too, the amount of stuff you have running at startup, the amount of stuff you have on your harddrive, the number of icons you have on your desktop, how much eye candy you have turned on in windows etc.

Answer 5

The CPU speed, the amount of RAM and the free space on the harddisk combined.

Answer 6

your processor will determine how fast applications process and help with multi-tasking (recommend a processor that runs at 2.4 GHz or faster)...along with the right amount of memory (depending on wut ur using the cpu for), will give u optimum performance......to be safe i would recommend at least 512MB of memory.....preferably 1GB

Answer 7

the size of the processor that you have

Answer 8

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