Using & Understanding CPU-Z

CPU

CPU-Z gives you a huge amount of information about your CPU, as well as well as your Motherboard, Memory and Graphics. It is available as an installer or as a stand alone .exe file. 


The front page allows you to identify your CPU, as well as what socket it uses to connect to the motherboard. The clock speed tells you the current clock speed of the chip which is equal to the Bus Speed times by the Multiplier. The amount of Cache is also shown, Cache is a very small superfast set of storage that stores the data being worked on by the CPU at any given time. More is better. Below this the number of Cores is also shown, as well as the number of threads. Some chips use a technique called hyperthreading to put 2 threads through one core at once. 
From this you can establish that my chip here is Phenom II 965. It's a Quad Core, and I've Overclocked it to 3.925GHz.


Motherboard

On this page you can find your motherboard information. It can be useful to type the "model" into google to find more information or to look for drivers. Also on this page is the Chipset, the chip which connects all the devices of the computer together. The BIOS version is also shown, along with the Graphics Interface, or slot, used for plugging in graphics cards.


Memory

Here you can identify not only how much RAM you have, but what type of ram (SDRAM, DDR (1,2,3)) whether it's running in multi channel mode (pairs of sticks), and what speed of ram it is. DDR stands for Dual Data Rate, so the value here (523MHz) would be doubled when looking to buy RAM. You can see here I have 4GB of 1066MHz (roughly) DDR2. The Timings displayed below are only particularly useful for those who are overclocking their RAM.


SPD

On this page you can see a breakdown of the modules of RAM in your machine. The drop down box shows you how many RAM slots there are. The information there shows the size of each stick as well as it's rated speed, manufacturer and part number. It can be useful to google this part number when looking for more ram of the same type. Below this you can again see a breakdown of the timings as well as voltage required for each speed. This can be useful if you are having stability issues. 


Graphics

Finally the Graphics tab helps you to identify your Graphics card, as well as the amount of RAM it has. For more Information on your Graphics Card, Take a look at our GPU-Z Article.


If you need any help, feel free to comment, ask a question in the bar on the left