What "Power" Actually Means in a PC

When talking about how powerful a PC is, my mind automatically goes to how much of their power bill their system takes up. Really when we’re talking about power, what we ask is how well does your PC perform? And how do we measure that? It’s not like the force; you can measure these types of things and it’s just a matter of figuring out what metric you want to use.

What does "Power" even mean?

The first answer that many people might jump to is the GPU, which is understandable given that specific part is responsible for the graphics you can visually see. There’s a noticeable difference between using a very basic GPU vs a high-end GPU with how it displays your graphics in game, and this can be measured with things like 3Dmark, testing how well your GPU can render images in a certain amount of time.

Maybe your mind goes to how fast the PC can process data, like watching how quickly a droid could move instead, you go by a measurable metric of speed. In that case you would look at the best performing CPU on the market. It’s measurable and we have benchmark software that can test to see specifically how fast your CPU runs in comparison to others; however, is it fair to judge how a PC can run off a single part given how many moving parts are in a custom PC? We at AVADirect think not.

Bottlenecks and Roadblocks

Let’s say you have a flagship GPU: does that even matter when you still have issues like stuttering or lag? Bottlenecks cause issues with performance as well! Let’s say that you have the best CPU currently on the market, yet the GPU is an older model which cuts down on processing power. While it can technically work with your new CPU, you are inclined to see dips in performance if the generational leaps are massive.

The same can be said if you have an older CPU with a newer GPU. If you were trying to render something on your PC, a video or animation for example, you could have the best rendering GPU on the market but without a proper CPU to process that data it could take far longer to render your project than it would with a more high-power CPU. For tasks like that it is crucial to make sure you have a high-end CPU and GPU to make sure there is nothing standing in the way of the power you need.

What if those two parts are perfectly fine in terms of compatibility, and instead the issue with performance comes from the thermals of the case causing issues with the CPU itself. This is why understanding your custom PC inside and out is critical for maximum performance, just like Jedi’s and Sith know their star fleets in and out to ensure a competitive edge over one another.

Balancing the Force of your Custom PC

The key here is balancing your system with the right parts, like the light side and dark side, it’s important not to lean too much on only one aspect of your system. A balanced system wouldn’t have a fancy motherboard with a CPU, RAM, and GPU from three generations ago. Instead, it would be beneficial to have a GPU that can evenly distribute performance alongside all other components to create a greater power ensuring that you are reaching top performance and really getting the best bang for your buck.

At AVADirect, we’ve brought customer’s builds to life without these bottlenecks, ensuring great performance all around after rigorous testing. This is to ensure that our customers get the most powerful versions of their PC’s. And if we encounter any disturbance in the force of your new custom PC, we work with them to find compatible alternatives to the parts that are causing said disturbance, whether it be storage, RAM, CPU, or the thermals.

So, what makes a PC powerful? It’s not just one part, it’s all of them, that’s what makes it a system.