CPU upgrades alone are a bad way to increase PC performance
Question:
Hey, thank you soo much for ur review of the “Story of Stuff”, i had tons of disagreements in mind so i wanted to do some research, but u did a lot of that for me haha. One thing im rly curious about, why cant the CPU just be replaced? is it cuz everything else must be reprogrammed to accomodate it?
Answer:
Why can’t you just replace the CPU to upgrade a computer and improve its speed? In “The Story of Stuff”, we hear that a small corner of a PC (presumably the CPU) is all that would really need to be upgraded in order to get a better-performing PC. I wrote that this example is incorrect - you can’t take an old PC, put in a new CPU, and get great (or even good performance). Here are reasons why I say this:
1) The CPU uses a special type of connector. This connector is where the CPU plugs in to the computers “mainboard”. Over time, these connectors have changed as technology has improved. Newer CPUs can not plug in to older computers - the connectors aren’t the same.
2) Even if you could plug a new PC into an old computer, you have the “bottleneck” issue. “The Story of Stuff” simplified a computer into a mysterious box where replacing one component will noticeably increase performance. This illustrates a big lack of understanding of how a computer works. A CPU is just one part of a PC that needs to function properly for good performance. The other primary parts are the hard drive and memory. If you could put a new CPU into an old computer, your system speed will still be slow because the hard drive and memory are slowing it down. You’d really have to upgrade all three of these aspects before getting a properly-speedy system. And if you’re willing to spend the money to do that, you might as well get a brand new PC anyway.
3) The above point just addresses the primary bottleneck points like CPU, hard drive and memory. There are other secondary (but still important) aspects that need to be upgraded if we want a nicely-performing system. These include system cache (a special kind of memory), and memory speeds (how fast your memory works) and bus speeds (how fast information is transferred from CPU to motherboard to memory).
The short version of everything above: A computer’s performance is not derived from just the CPU. There are many parts just as important to performance as the CPU, and these all need to be addressed when upgrading. Upgrading just a CPU will give only minimal performance gains. Newer CPUs will not work in older PCs.
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