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 microarchitecture they use.
Each new generation of CPUs
typically contains microarchitectural 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 microarchitecture
and the same number of cores.
Otherwise, you're not gonna wanna 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's gonna 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 pretty 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 IOPS 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.
Now 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.
Anything 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 IP3 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.
Really just lay into us here.
Talk about your frustrations.
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