Whenever you shop for electronics, it's pretty easy to get lost in a discombobulating vortex
of numbers that manufacturers throw at you to try to entice you to buy their gadgets.
Ah! But, there are some that are really just fluff you can more or less ignore.
So what are they? Let's start out with one of the most common and most useless specifications you'll see.
A CPU's clock speed, usually given in gigahertz.
You'll see this as being one of the first things listed for most PCs that you buy,
and it's very easy to think, hmm, more gigahertz equals faster computer!
See here's the thing, you can't really compare clock speeds between different computers.
Processors have all sorts of other differentiating factors that are more important, such as the
specific micro-architecture they use. Each new generation of CPU's typically contains micro-architectural improvements in the silicon
that can give you higher instructions per clock cycle, better branch prediction, and
more power efficiency. All of which are more important than the raw number of gigahertz.
Clock speeds only really matter when you compare chips with the same micro-architecture and
the same number of cores. Otherwise, you're not going to want to fret over this too much, it's kind of like how
a Kia Rio and an Aston Martin Vantage can both reach 100 miles per hour, but the Aston
Martin is going to get up to speed much faster and be far more powerful and responsive.
Next up, let's talk about those eye-popping speeds that SSD companies put on their product
labels. It's easy these days to find SSDs that claim to give you speeds at or above 3,000 megabytes
per second, but those figures can be misleading.
And while it's true that the NVMe-based SSDs that boast this kind of performance are indeed
faster across the board than their older SATA counterparts, it doesn't mean you can
completely trust their numbers either. You see, there are two main issues with just looking at that spec.
Those high megabytes per second numbers refer to sequential performance, meaning it's not
a good metric of performance if you spend most of your time watching videos, working
in Excel, or serving up spicy takes on Twitter.
During typical, everyday use, the random performance, given in eye-ops, is more important, as you'll
usually be accessing smaller pieces of information from different places on the drive than large
sequential chunks of data located in a physically contiguous spot.
But let's say, for the sake of argument, you do work with large amounts of sequential
data because you're a video editor or some such thing.
Even in this situation, the numbers on the spec sheet often aren't reliable.
Many SSDs have a relatively small amount of fast cache that's used when you first start
moving files around, but as time goes on, sometimes even after just a few seconds, speeds
will drop off precipitously as the cache fills and the SSD starts using the slower portion
of its flash memory. This isn't to say all SSD manufacturers are dishonest, but some of them will put down
a speed that you'll only realistically get for a short period of time.
So be sure to read independent reviews and see how long the SSD you're interested in
can maintain performance at or near what it says on the spec sheet.
Finally, let's touch on a common letdown if you're shopping for monitors.
HDR support. HDR, or High Dynamic Range, is a set of standards that can give you better contrast and clearer
colors. But a monitor simply saying it has HDR support doesn't tell you very much, since there are
a lot of monitors out there that technically accept an HDR signal, but the picture ends
up looking like absolute garbage when you turn it on. So why does this happen?
The two primary culprits are when the monitor can't get bright enough, as adequate brightness
is crucial for HDR to look correct, and when the monitor can't display a wide enough color
gamut or give enough color accuracy to take full advantage of the HDR signal.
So instead of jumping on a monitor just because it says it has HDR support, check its peak
brightness rating. Something that's certified for VESA Display HDR 600 or higher should at least get adequately
bright with Display HDR 1000 or higher being ideal.
A monitor that can cover at least 90% of the DCI-P3 color gamut is probably also a decent
bet. But if you really want to be sure, read reviews where an actual human being looked at the
screen with HDR turned on. Are there specs that manufacturers push that frustrate you?
Let us know what they are in the comments and we might talk about them in a future episode.
Talk about your frustrations. Woah, that was a tech wiki alright, thanks for watching guys, like the video, dislike
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