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I’m writing this on a laptop with an Intel Pentium N5030. It was not a powerful CPU by any means brand new, but several years later, it works just fine. Turns out, a low-power CPU might be all you need.
A Low-Powered CPU Is Good Enough for Most People
Most of us don’t buy high-end PCs or premium phones. If you aren’t working from your computer each day, you’re probably only really using it for web browsing, communication, viewing the occasional document, and watching videos. None of these require a powerful CPU. Web browsing is the most demanding of these tasks, but you may usually improve that situation by getting more RAM, not adding more CPU cores.
Even if you earn your income working on a PC, most of us spend our days entirely in a browser. We’re stuck using Slack, Teams, Outlook, and Google Docs, all tasks a low-powered Chromebook can handle. It’s when you start to compile code and run intense applications that you really start to understand the limitations of a weak CPU. If that’s your day-to-day need, then by all means, get a stronger CPU.
There’s another big exception, and that’s gamers. Most of us aren’t trying to play games on our PCs (PC gaming is in the minority compared to consoles and mobile), but if you are, then yes, get a more powerful processor and do so knowing you have a clear and obvious reason why.
A Weaker CPU Saves You Money
Many of us associate weak CPUs with cheap, low-quality computers. Yet it’s often not the processor that drags the experience down. Many companies pair a low-power CPU with only 4GB or 8GB of RAM, a slow hard drive, and a low-resolution screen. That’s a marketing decision more than anything else.
You can get a mini PC for under $200 from a company likeBeelink. You can then plug this PC into a 4K monitor and connect one of the best Bluetooth keyboards you find. Get yourself a luxurious mouse. You will now feel like you have a premium rig without sinking hundreds of dollars more into a more powerful CPU that you didn’t actually need.
You’ll Lower Your Electricity Bill
TDP, or Thermal Design Power (not to be confused with TGP), is one of the details I look at first when considering a new computer. This number tells you the maximum wattage the computer’s cooling system needs to be able to handle and gives you an idea of how much electricity your machine will pull each hour.
Having a lower TDP reduces your monthly bill if you live somewhere with expensive energy costs. Likewise, if you’re trying to build a solar-powered, off-grid home, this reduces the number of panels you need and puts less strain on your inverter.
I have solar panels offsetting most of the electricity that my home and cars use, but I don’t have a home backup battery yet. I want my equipment to be as low-power and efficient as possible for the day when I do. That’s the cheaper option than buying more panels, bigger batteries, and a large inverter for power-thirsty appliances like a beefy desktop rig.
A Fanless Chip Can Be Completely Silent
The chips in our phones and tablets are slightly different from those in our PCs. ARM processors are fanless, so they don’t make any noise, while Most Intel CPUs require a fan to achieve similar performance.
Yet Intel does offer CPUs designed to be used without a fan. These low-powered Intel N-series CPUs are found inside affordable mini PCs and laptops. Their silence is part of their appeal, making them well suited for people sharing an office. Some of us, once we grow accustomed to silent computers, don’t want to go back to hearing a fan whir just from web browsing.
Not all fanless chips are cheap. The lack of a fan is part of what’s so impressive aboutApple Silicon and the latest crop of Qualcomm Snapdragon X Windows PCs. Yet those are $1000 computers. You can get a low-power Intel CPU or even a single-board computer like thevery versatile Raspberry Piand enjoy quiet computing for much less.
You May Get Better Battery Life
My laptop has a TDP of 6W, which means it gets a usable amount of battery life out of a small 30W battery. If it were paired with a larger battery, battery life would stretch even further.
Unlike with desktop computers, we don’t have the luxury of picking and choosing all of our components when buying a laptop. Even the Framework doesn’t let you slap in any battery you want. That means the battery we have is the battery we’re stuck with, but we do have some say in the CPU we choose. If debating between an Intel Core 3 Processor and an Intel Core 7 Processor, battery life is one reason to go with the former. Lower performance typically means less demand on your battery.
Old CPUs Are Still Powerful Enough for Today
Quite frankly,CPUs have come a long way. Still, in a sign of how little processing power is truly needed to run a computer, tryinstalling Linux on a laptop from 10 years ago. Chances are, it will run very smoothly. How usable the laptop will be depends largely on whether it’s an old machine with only 4GB of RAM or a spinning hard disk drive. If you’re able to bump that up to 16GB and swap out the hard drive for an SSD, you have a perfectly usable web browsing machine. Even if you’re hesitant about trying Linux, that isn’t your only option whenditching Windows to revive an old PC.
So if your concern is future-proofing, there isn’t much reason to fret about it. You can still get plenty of usage out of a lower-powered CPU for years to come.
There’s a big caveat, and that’s to do with AI. The features that companies are racing to bake into their operating systems do come with higher system requirements,such as with Microsoft’s CoPilot+ machines. If you’re bullish on some day holding conversations with a digital assistant that is able to scan the files on your machine and analyze that data, you’re going to need more processing power.
Save Chips for Those Who Need Them
Chips are in everything, from our cars to our refrigerators. There is a massive demand for processors, and this has led to shortages. We particularly felt this during the COVID pandemic throughout 2020 and 2021.
There are two ways to approach this situation. One is increasing production, and companies are working on doing that. But there are finite resources out there, no matter how efficient manufacturers get at fabricating processors. The other approach is reducing demand. Those of us who don’t need high processing power can leave those chips for those who do. I’m a writer. Do I need an Intel Core Ultra CPU and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 to open a plain text editor and chat with my editors? No, even if my job is to cover tech. I simply don’t.
Look at your use cases and buy the amount of processing power you need to do those tasks.
The CPU isn’t everything. Many of us can get the speed improvements we seek by bumping up our RAM and swapping out an SSD drive for an NVMe. Computer makers want you to spend hundreds more on the highest-specced version of their PCs, but for most of us, the base model is more than capable of meeting our needs.
