Why I’m an idiot (and why GPUs are the focus of EVERY PC build)

Published in

Geek Culture

6 min readAug 8, 2022

I started writing this week’s blog post with the intent of proving that CPUs should be the focus of your PC build, not GPUs. Typically, PC builders pay extra for a better GPU than a better CPU. I thought in my great brilliantness that instead of paying extra for a better GPU, you should pay extra for the CPU. Oh, boy. I was very, very wrong.

But despite my faulty reasoning, I decided to go ahead. I titled my post, “CPUs should be the focus of your PC builds, not GPUs”. I wrote an intro and did a ton of research into what the confusing specifications mean on CPUs and GPUs. After writing down the relevant information, I proceeded to find 2 youtube videos that tracked the FPS of different games with the CPUs and GPUs I wanted to compare(i5 12600k, i7 12700k, i9 12900k, 3060, 3060 Ti, 3070, 3070 Ti, 3080, 3080 Ti, 3090). I left out the cheapest and most expensive parts from the CPU category and the GPU category(i3 12100, i9 12900KS, 3050, 3090 Ti). I did this because most PC builders won’t go for the cheapest nor the most expensive option.

Now you may be wondering why I chose Intel and Nvidia. currently, they offer the best price for performance so that’s why I chose them. Back to the story of my utter downfall.

After finding the youtube videos, I took notes on all the data, confident that it was going to support my hypothesis. After taking the average FPS of each CPU and GPU, I found the percentage increase from one GPU/CPU to its higher-end brother. So for example I found the percentage increase in FPS from the i5 to the i7 or the percentage increase from the 3060 Ti to the 3070. After I did this, I took an average of all the percentages. And to my great astonishment, I was wrong. I had put in all this time and effort only to realize that I was wrong. I didn’t know what to do. I had put all this time into making this blog post and it was all wrong. After thinking about it for while, I figured that I should at least write something. So here I am. Writing. But then I had a bright idea. What if I just used all the information I just gathered and instead of using it to support CPUs make it support GPUs? So that’s what I did.

Below you will find the results of my research and below that, you will find out what those weird specifications mean when people talk about CPUs and GPUs. Have fun reading! :)

What is a CPU?

A CPU or central processing unit takes input data, processes it, and outputs results. In other words, it is the brain of the computer.

The CPU is responsible for running programs on your computer. Without a CPU, you wouldn’t be able to run windows, open your browser, or watch your favorite Youtube video.

A CPU has cores. These cores are the part of the CPU that does the computing/processing. One core is equivalent to one task being done at one time. So if you have an 8-core CPU, that CPU can perform up to 8 tasks at once.

A CPU also has threads. Simultaneous multi-threading or hyper-threading takes a CPU and breaks it into 2 virtual cores. This allows for 2 different streams of information to flow into one core, making the processing time far quicker than if there was no threading involved at all.

Some applications and programs take full use of the threads, while others (usually older applications or programs) prefer to use a small number of cores.

GHz, in its simplest definition, measures the speed of the CPU. The higher the clock speed (measured in GHz) the faster the CPU is. There is a base clock speed and boost clock speed. Base clock speed is what the CPU would normally operate at. Boost clock speed is when the CPU increases its speed under a heavy workload.

There is a lot more information as to what a CPU is and what it does, but it either is unrelated or not important.

So hopefully after reading this, you now understand what I mean when I say, the Ryzen 7 5800x is an 8-core, 16-thread CPU, with a base clock speed of 3.6 GHz and a boost clock speed of 4.7 GHz.

What is a GPU?

A GPU or graphics processing unit simply renders images, video, and 2d and 3d animations. This frees the CPU to do other things.

There are two types of GPUs: integrated and discrete. Integrated GPUs are located in your CPU and use the PC’s RAM. Discrete GPUs have their card and use their RAM(known as VRAM).

Discrete will offer better performance while integrated is cheaper.

VRAM or video memory temporarily stores textures files and other assets while the game is running. Also the faster the VRAM the faster your games will load.

There is memory clock speed and core clock speed. Memory clock speed increases the speed of your VRAM, although this doesn’t affect FPS. Core clock speed increases the speed of the cores in the GPU, thus increasing FPS.

Boost clock speed refers to when the GPU is under heavy load and will boost itself an extra 100–200 MHz to provide extra performance under load. This is important if you decide not to overclock because the boost clock speed is the fastest your card can go. This means that the higher the boost clock speed the higher the FPS your card can provide without overclocking. If you are planning to overclock then ignore the boost clock speed as you will be going above that when overclocking.

The RESULTS

The CPUs were tested with an RTX 3090 and the GPUs with an i9 12900k.

As you can see the average FPS increase from each CPU was on average 2.95%. With the GPUs, the number was 5.98%, contradicting my earlier hypothesis. I thought that the average FPS increase would be greater for the CPUs than the GPUs. If it was greater then it would make sense to get a higher-end CPU than a GPU. But alas I was wrong.

Conclusion

Despite my trials and tribulations in writing this post, I (and by I, I mean we) found out some valuable life lessons.

We can be wrong sometimes.
Don’t expect a CPU to do a GPU’s job better than the GPU.

Upcoming Posts

I am going away on a couple of trips for the next couple of weeks so the weekly articles will either be published later than usual or will be published after I come back.

I hope you liked this post. If you did let me know by giving me a clap. If you didn’t let me know in the comments. :)

If you have a specific topic you want me to explore, let me know in the comments.

Signed, your foolish computer geek,

Sam Mishin

Links to resources I used: