Speed does matter

As we violently enter the ‘new’ era of Mercedes and BMW style CPU model names, keep in mind that clock speed does matter. Unfortunately, it’s only relevant between CPUs with the same internals. Differences in cache size, pipeline construction, instruction set, etc., make direct GHz to GHz comparisons impossible. It was meant to be confusing.

On the bright side, as Alice and I pointed out several many years ago, you can achieve anywhere from a 10% to 14% increase in overall system speed just by upgrading your graphics card (and often a smaller boost by just updating the drivers for your current graphics card). This is especially true if you’re starting off with that crappy integrated video on your motherboard.