In this video, you're going to learn to be able to describe the components of a computer system, namely, what those components are, what they do and how they are measured. The mandatory components of a computer system are the CPU, graphics card, the motherboard, memory, and storage. CPU, which stands for central processing unit, is the brain of your computer. Its speed is measured in two ways; gigahertz and cores. With gigahertz being a measure of how fast your CPU thinks and cores being a count of how many mini CPUs are within your CPU for it to do the thinking with. If I can use an analogy, if we were doing construction, the gigahertz would be a measure of how fast your workers work. The cores would be a count of how many workers you have. This is one of the three components that dictate the speed of your system. What that means is that if your system is running a little slow and you can pull out the existing CPU and replace it with one that either runs at a higher gigahertz, has more cores or both, then your system as a whole will become faster. Graphics cards. The graphics card enables the computer to connect to a monitor, They can range in cost anywhere from a rudimentary nine-dollar graphics card, which would probably only be good for word processing and spreadsheets to $30,000 graphics cards. Now, those $30,000 graphics cards aren't being used for gaming. They are used for cryptocurrency. Because they can be used for bitcoin mining and they're very good at it, they're actually worth what they cost. Memory. Now your computer's short-term memory is also known as its RAM, its random access memory. Its size is measured in gigabytes, gigabytes being a billion bytes and it's one of the three components that dictate the system speed. Again, just like with the CPU, all other things being equal, if you take an existing computer and you increase the amount of RAM that's inside that computer, the computer will run faster. Modern systems need at least four gigabytes of RAM to run operating systems like macOS, Windows 10, Windows 11, or Linux. Storage. Your storage, your systems hard drive represents your computer's long-term or permanent storage, the information that doesn't get lost when you turn your machine off. Its size is measured in gigabytes or billions of bytes and terabytes or trillions of bytes. There are two types of storage you can put in your computer, SSDs or solid-state drives is relatively new within the last 10-15 years. It is a newer technology that runs extremely fast, 10 times faster or more than a hard disk drive. But a HDD or hard disk drive is a technology that dates back from the '80s. At this point is not as fast by any means as a solid-state drive, but it's extremely cheap. You can buy systems that have either of these and sometimes both. Your storage is one of the three components that dictates your system's speed. All other things being equal, if you take a computer that's running a little slow and you make the hard drive faster, either you get a hard disk drive that's faster than your existing hard disk drive, or you switch your hard disk drive to an SSD, the entire machine will run faster and you'll have a better experience using your computer. Those three things that you can change are your CPU, your memory, and your storage. The final component that we're going to talk about is the motherboard. The motherboard connects all of your components together, your CPU, your memory, your storage, even your graphics card, all plugged directly into the motherboard. It is what allows them to talk to each other. The speed at which that information travels across the motherboard from one component to another is known as the bus speed. In this video, we talked about the mandatory components of a computer system. We've talked about the CPU, the central processing unit, the graphics card, the motherboard, the memory, and the storage. Additionally, we talked about the three keys to a faster the computer, namely the CPU, the memory or RAM, and the storage or the drives, whether you have a hard drive or a solid-state drive. Having watched this video, you should have a better understanding of the components that are inside of your computer, as well as the keys to making your computer faster. Now that you've completed this video, you should be able to describe the components of a computer system, namely what those components are, what they do, and how they are measured.
