A little over four years ago, I built myself a gaming PC for my birthday. My years-long dream of tinkering a computer of my own specifications into existence came true, and save for a frustrating issue with a stick of RAM, which occurred days out of warranty, the computer has served me well for its entire existence.

That being said, as any computer user can relate, a four year old computer does not always perform nearly as well as it did when it was new. 

My goal was to tinker with my computer by expanding the storage and overclocking my graphics card. I have never overclocked a component, so it was a new and interesting challenge. Expanding the storage is something I have much more experience with, and was a simple process of plugging in a few wires and mounting the parts. 

The best part of this endeavor: the process was entirely free. The HDD and SSD I installed were salvaged from an old desktop and laptop respectively—parts I had lying around. The overclocking was done with free software and only augmented components already installed in the computer.

 

Installing the drives

To install the two drives, a 250 GB SSD and a 1 TB HDD, I used the SATA power cable coming from my power supply, and attached two additional SATA data cables to my motherboard. The 1TB HDD, a 3.5 inch drive, fit into the second of two drive bays in the bottom of the computer, and the SSD fit on a side mounted slot in the back of the case.

 

Overclocking

Overclocking is the process of increasing the clock speed of a computer component beyond the originally designated speed. Measured as a frequency, usually in gHz, the “clock speed” represents the number of times in a second a computer can complete a task (called instructions per clock). While it may seem concerning to run a chip at higher than its rated clock speed, if you have sufficient cooling, it is completely safe to do so. 

I used a program called MSI Afterburner to overclock my GPU. While it normally has an intelligent automatic overclocking mode, I had an error message come up every time I tried the automatic mode, so I had to overclock manually. Manual overclocking is nothing short of trial and error. 

First, I set a custom fan curve, so that the fans of my GPU begin to ramp up more quickly at lower temperatures and keep the overall temperatures down. Then, I increased the maximum voltage. (I increased it to the maximum value, but the GPU will not permit higher voltage than it is rated by the manufacturer, but the voltage out of the box is lower than the peak voltage.) Then, I set a baseline overclock of +100 MHz to the core clock (the processing unit speed) and of +500 MHz to the memory clock (the RAM used by the GPU).

Quantitatively, in a synthetic benchmark, which is not always representative of real use, I had a performance increase of 8.6% without spending a dime. While that is impressive, what is more important to me is the qualitative experience of several games which I very much enjoy (like Forza Horizon 4) becoming considerably smoother. 

And with that, I could spend the rest of my break enjoying my computer even more than before.

Whether you want to do some actual tinkering (building or repairing) or simply want to effectively compare device models, it is important to have at least a basic understanding of the parts of a computer and how they mesh together. While devices take different shapes and sizes, just about every piece of technology, including your laptop, phone, and even your TV will contain these components I describe below. This post will not be a deep dive into how each of these components work, but I hope to impart a baseline understanding of what they look like, how they function, and how they fit together.

It is important to note that the form factor (basic size and shape) of each computer has a significant impact on what each of the components look like. A desktop computer motherboard will look different from that of a laptop and that of a phone. 

 

“The Backbone”

First, the motherboard. The motherboard acts as a home for the various components of the computer. All of the components in the rest of the post connect in one way or another to the motherboard, but similar to a backbone or spine, it is neither useful nor functional without anything attached to it!

Motherboards come, literally, in all shapes and sizes; they are often custom made for individual laptop, phone, and tablet models, and desktop computers alone have upwards of a dozen different motherboard sizes. 

 

“The Brain” 

What I am calling the “brain” of the computer consists of several different and highly interconnected parts. Each of these parts are responsible for the main computation of the computer or the short-term or long-term storage of data.

CPU- the thinker

The CPU (central processing unit) is sometimes referred to as the “brain” of a computer by itself. The CPU is optimized to perform a wide variety of diverse tasks, from computations on Excel spreadsheets to performing artificial intelligence  logic in a video game.  

RAM – the short-term memory

RAM, short for Random Access Memory, sometimes referred to as simply “memory” is very fast, but volatile storage. “Volatile” means when the computer is powered off, all data stored only in RAM will be lost. RAM has a very fast connection to the CPU and is useful in storing data actively being used by programs. 

Storage –  the long-term memory

A long-term storage device can come either in the form of a spinning hard disk drive (HDD) or a fully digital solid state drive (SSD). Unlike RAM, this type of storage is nonvolatile and retains data even without power.

HDDs are typically less expensive, particularly at higher capacities, but are slower and prone to data loss from magnets and shock damage from drops. SSDs are usually more expensive, but much faster, more reliable, and smaller than HDDs.

GPU – the visual cortex

The graphics card, also called the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), is optimized to perform similar, repetitive computations, making it able to efficiently and quickly produce frames in a video game and complete repetitive tasks such as video rendering.

GPUs can be very powerful, ready to play games or quickly render graphically intensive videos, but this also makes them get very physically hot. They may require several large fans to keep them safely cool, such as the one in the bottom of the picture above. Within smaller desktops and laptops, the GPU will be much smaller (for small desktops it may look like the GPU at the top of the image above), due to the decreased capacity to cool the parts within a smaller chassis. 

 

“The Face”

For the typical desktop computer, the display is a separate monitor, a completely external component, which can be easily swapped out and upgraded. For a laptop or phone, however, the display is deeply connected to its functionality. 

 

Knowing the anatomy of a computer is requisite to being able to tinker with it. A pre-built desktop computer is often more modular than you might think, with the capacity to add storage, upgrade RAM and GPU, and even, if you’re feeling adventurous, replace the CPU as well. It is also possible to purchase parts of a computer separately to build a computer for yourself as a more gratifying and cost-effective option to an off-the-shelf computer. It is harder to upgrade devices like laptops and phones where many of these components are soldered into larger, non-user-upgradeable pieces, but there are still opportunities to perform repairs and upgrades on components like batteries and broken screens.