Easy Guide On Keeping Up With Latest PC Hardware
Confused and lost about PC hardware?
I haven’t upgraded my computer since 2009. That is 8 years ago and I am still using the computer to type this right now. If you are like me and haven’t really looked into upgrading PC components in awhile, then it can be overwhelming. It has after all been 8 years and a lot has changed since first building my computer. However, the main components of a PC still remain -PC case, power supply, motherboard, CPU, GPU, RAM, and a hard drive. Although, nowadays they are much more powerful than my 8 year old computer. Moore’s Law can do that (which is the law that the number of transistors per square inch will double each year). Surprising, people are arguing that Moore’s Law is coming to an end, but that is for a later article.
One major change to PCs are NVMe Devices
In short, these devices are just faster hard drives and solid state drives (ssd). They are much faster than old hard disk drives. Here is a quick comparison:
HDD read/write speed: 145.4 MB/s / 138.6 MB/s
SSD read/write speed: 494 MB/s / 402 MB/s
M.2 NVMe SSD read/write speed: 3,200 MB/s / 1,900 MB/s
As you can tell by the numbers, hard drives have vastly improved read and write speeds. Making loading and wait times almost gone. The fastest M.2 NVMe SSDs are from Samsung and they are the 960 PRO line which you can find here. Although to utilize these new M.2 NVMe SSD devices you need an up to date motherboard that can accept the M.2 form factor of these super fast data storages, which I will talk about next -an easy way to find the latest motherboard.
Easy way to find out which motherboards, CPUs, GPUs, etc are the most recent and fresh hardware.
It’s not always easy to keep up to date with the latest PC hardware components. But on this site, PCgeek.info I will keep it easy and simple and keep the most updated CPUs, GPUs, and other PC components on the sidebar to the right. This way anytime you visit the site it will always have the latest information. This will help keep newcomers and also oldtimers up to date with the latest PC hardware. However, if you want to look up the latest and most up to date hardware, there is another way to do it. Here it is:
- Check the latest CPUs from Intel or AMD (which are the two main CPU manufacturers).
- Now that we know which CPUs are the latest we need to find out which socket type they use and find the latest motherboards that have them.
- AMD Ryzen uses socket AM4. You can do a quick search on Amazon, “AM4 motherboards” or just search “Ryzen Motherboards” and you will find the compatible motherboards.
- Intel uses socket type LGA1151 for their latest CPUs (7th generation i7-7700k). Doing a quick search on Amazon, “LGA 1151 motherboards” will find the most up to date motherboards.
You can also just check out most motherboard manufacturers and browse their main website for the latest motherboards. Make search to filter the motherboards by date to get the latest product.
Searching for the latest GPU from AMD and Nvidia
There are always new graphics cards coming out every year and to make it easy here are the latest graphics cards you can buy right now from AMD and Nvidia:
An easy way to find out the latest graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia is to look at the GPU release dates: You can find AMD’s Radeon wiki page here. And Nvidia’s GeForce wiki page here. This way you can easily find out which graphics card was released recently. This will help you find the latest graphics card if you are looking to upgrade.
Please let me know in the comments below how you find the latest and greatest PC hardware. I hope this article helps you find what you are looking for and I know it can be tough trying to figure out which CPUs, GPUs, SSDs, etc is the best to buy. Hopefully this will ease the confusing PC market. Thanks for reading!
