What PC Part Do You Feel is The Most Important?

[Frag Mortuus]

Since our PC boards seem to be pretty popular lately, I decided to take a poll to see what my fellow Racketeers thought was the most integral part of the PC. A good argument could be made for nearly any part, and all of them are justifiably correct. So again, I ask what do you think is the most important and comment why?

Maybe we can all learn something about how various parts interact with one another so the next time we build a PC we can save money on a part that won't improve the performance of a certain function we feel is most important and invest it into a higher end part that will.

[noiseredux]

well since it's a gaming forum I went w/ GPU. In my mind that one piece is the difference between "a PC" and "a gaming PC." Also as much as I want to upgrade my CPU, we've talked about how little an i3 has kept me back as long as I've had decent graphics cards. So yeah.

[Frag Mortuus]

I haven't voted yet, because I honestly can't decide. Lately, I'm actually thinking it may be the monitor. I wanted to get my hands on the incredibly expensive, yet incredibly awesome ASUS ROG Swift monitor, but seeing how ASUS can't keep them in stock and there is likely no end in site for the shortage, I've decided to look at other monitors. Which has taught me that a lot of folks feel the monitor is most important because at the end of the day, all the money you invest in a PC to play games and to get amazing image quality is all for not if the display can't render that amazing image well enough. But then again, if you want a 4k, or a 1440p G-Sync capable monitor with a 144Hz refresh rate, you have to have the PC hardware to produce and keep up with the monitor's demands.

It's a tough call!

[Hobie-wan]

Power supply. If you have one that's providing shitty power it can cause everything to be flaky, not work at all, or blow up. I'm speaking from experience for the latter which cost me a motherboard once.

/thread

On a related note, your wheels and brakes are the most important part of your car. Stopping and steering are more important than anything else.

[Flake]

This poll is wacky because you really don't have a computer until you have all those parts in place. On that note, I went with motherboard. It's the foundation for everything. You can have the best PSU, GPU, CPU, whatever U but if your motherboard is outdated, it's all a bunch of paper weights.

[Hazerd]

Basically if you just want to play with the bios, you need MOBO/CPU/PSU/RAM, could make a RAM disk for HDD maybe lol, not sure on that one, never tried it.

But with CPU's having integrated GPU's now, GPU is the last thing you need honestly, and paying over $300 for a GPU is just spoiling yourself.

I voted for CPU, because once you have all the parts, everything really goes through that, but all the parts play a big role.

I take mouse/keyboard/monitor/cooling for granted, because its like buying a car without wheels, i mean the car should come with wheels right!?

[Erik_Twice]

On a related note, your wheels and brakes are the most important part of your car. Stopping and steering are more important than anything else.

More than actually moving?

You are totally right on getting a good power supply, though. You can get by with a weak processor or a small amount of memory but a bad power supply will eventually bite you in the ass.

[Hobie-wan]

On a related note, your wheels and brakes are the most important part of your car. Stopping and steering are more important than anything else.

More than actually moving?

Yes. If you're not moving because you're out of gas or your engine died, that's annoying. If you have an accident because you have bald tires and slide into a tree around a corner or can't stop at a red light on a hill, that's a bit more of a problem.

[J T]

On a related note, your wheels and brakes are the most important part of your car. Stopping and steering are more important than anything else.

But without a decent sound system, what's the point?

[Tanooki]

Other than the essentials to even see or type what you're doing I'd put it on the video card these days.

The line of processors the last few years or so when it went into the i3-7 line have been pretty solid yet kind of flat when it comes to needing more entertainment level performance. RAM sure helps if you need more, but only to a point. Video cards though, you go from one to the next you can make even a 5 year old computer seem like new along with some added memory.

I just in the last week retired a 7 year old Dell quad core machine to the closet as a backup. About 3 years ago it was feeling a bit crappy, it was living off 3GB of ram (still does) and an awful radeon hd card with just 256MB of vram on it. I went and cleaned up the computer of garbage and old registry fluff and dropped less than a $100 on a 2GB radeon video card and suddenly anything gaming and photoshop boosted like mad in quality I had never expected, even windows got a touch nicer too all from the video card so I didn't bother getting more ram for it.

My new laptop here has 16GB of ram in it (goes to 32) and an i7 processor(base model, can go way higher to a $900 currently priced chip.) What I did was go max out on the video the nvidia gtx980 card and it's crazy. Down the line I'll boost the cpu and ram when needed.