-"what are all the things inside the pc that affect Internet speed?"

[Junkos]

So let's say I want to skype a lot and play games/watch movies at the same time, i really value high internet speed 

ive been putting off buying anything because I'm not sure if there is some amazing hardware I can buy to make my internet zoom zoom

i know there's things outside of the pc I can get but what are all the things inside the pc that affect Internet speed? I've been looking up this stuff all day but I just can't ..understand that well lol

[ShadowCaptain]

13 minutes ago, Junkos said:

SNIP

 

EDIT -first things first, is having a fast internet connection - so for example a fast fibre optic broadband package from your local ISP

 

if you have slow internet from your ISP, no matter your hardware, you will have a slow connection

Assuming you have fast internet coming into the house....

 

The only thing you need to utilise faster interent is a fast network card (and network in total)

So essentially as long as your router, and method of getting internet to the PC is not a bottleneck, (ie gigabit Ethernet, or wireless AC for example) then that is all you need to worry about

(this obviously assumes your PC is powerful enough to run all the programs you want, and an SSD can help with loading times, example joining a BF4 server, the game loads faster on SSD, opening a web page is faster too)

 

So

 

ISP

Router

Ethernet/Wifi

Network card

 

And a fast PC

[DXMember]

ISP, but it's outside the PC....

if your ISP sucks then there's not much anything inside the PC can help you

[ShadowCaptain]

Just now, DXMember said:

ISP, but it's outside the PC....

if your ISP sucks then there's not much anything inside the PC can help you

 

That too!

[manikyath]

if your pc isnt an outright potato, theres not much to improve on your pc.

[Junkos]

12 minutes ago, ShadowCaptain said:

 

EDIT -first things first, is having a fast internet connection - so for example a fast fibre optic broadband package from your local ISP

 

if you have slow internet from your ISP, no matter your hardware, you will have a slow connection

Assuming you have fast internet coming into the house....

 

The only thing you need to utilise faster interent is a fast network card (and network in total)

So essentially as long as your router, and method of getting internet to the PC is not a bottleneck, (ie gigabit Ethernet, or wireless AC for example) then that is all you need to worry about

(this obviously assumes your PC is powerful enough to run all the programs you want, and an SSD can help with loading times, example joining a BF4 server, the game loads faster on SSD, opening a web page is faster too)

 

So

 

ISP

Router

Ethernet/Wifi

Network card

 

And a fast PC

This was helpful, thank you for the info!

[ShadowCaptain]

Just now, Junkos said:

This was helpful, thank you for the info!

no worries 

 

so yeah , get a fast internet package,and if you can, use ethernet ;D

[I am an SSD]

20 minutes ago, Junkos said:

So let's say I want to skype a lot and play games/watch movies at the same time, i really value high internet speed 

ive been putting off buying anything because I'm not sure if there is some amazing hardware I can buy to make my internet zoom zoom

i know there's things outside of the pc I can get but what are all the things inside the pc that affect Internet speed? I've been looking up this stuff all day but I just can't ..understand that well lol

Background services (does not affect a lot but will help).....go to task manager and check what is hogging your bandwidth

Do a check on whether you really need it or not. more often than not, you wont. Disable it.

 

Wifi adapter  Assuming you are using a laptop, the Wifi adapters included in portable devices are usually really really bad. (especially Lenovo) This will result is dropped connection speeds (im talking fluctuations from 10mbps to 0.8 mbps) even at very small distances. You will have to move your device closer to the router to get the connection up and running again.

[SaladFingers]

Another thing you could possibly look into, if you are multitaksing a lot and have several programs using the internet you could perhaps look into motherboards/network cards with prioritization software. Then you could for example put your video streams or games on high priority so they never lag, but put your torrents or your steam client on normal or lower priority so they don't lag the more important things that need to be snappy. 

 

Example, say you are downloading a steam game but you want to watch a netflix stream at the same time. There is a chance that steam will saturate most of your bandwidth resulting in netflix lagging. If you change the priorities, netflix will be able to use all the bandwidth it needs to work lag-free, and what remains is going to be used by steam to download.

 

Other than that, what others said already. Get a good connection from your ISP, get a good router, use ethernet, have a good quality network card on your PC and generally if your CPU isn't ancient you don't really need to worry about other specs.

[Vali]

The most important thing you can control is how do you use the available connection. It does not matter having 1 Gbps at home if you saturate the line, for example using torrent or syncing a virtual drive over the internet.

 

...and use cable, not wifi

[brwainer]

If your CPU or hard drive aren't the newest, say more than 6 years old, while they won't affect your internet speeds, they will slow down the processing speed of your browser and other software. Modern websites use lots of scripts for lots of things (not just for ads!) and that's why your CPU and browser matter. Downloading files depends on the speed of your hard drive it can be a bottleneck for downloads - but probably only if you have gigabit speeds. There was a guy on here whose hard drive was making his downloads cap out at about 400Mb/s while another computer on the same network got 950Mb/s, and it turned out the slow computer was being bottlenecked by the hard drive.

 

If you don't have enough physical RAM, your percieved internet speeds might be slowed down by your computer's constant use of swap space.