Random Access Memory or RAM

What is a Hard Drive?

The hard drive is a storage device responsible for storing permanent and temporary data. This data comes in many different forms, but is essentially anything saved or installed to a computer: for example, computer programs, family photos, operating system, word-processing documents, and so on.  Find out more about hard drives and how they work.

There are two different types of storage devices: the traditional hard disk drive (HDD) and the newer solid state drives (SSD). Hard disk drives work by writing binary data onto spinning magnetic disks called platters that rotate at high speeds, while a solid-state drive stores data by using static flash memory chips.

What is a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)?

Especially important for 3D rendering, the GPU does exactly what its name suggests and processes huge batches of graphic data. You will find that your computer’s graphics card has at least one GPU. As opposed to the basic on-board graphic capabilities that PC motherboards supply, dedicated graphics cards interface with the motherboard via an expansion slot to work almost exclusively on graphic rendering. This also means you can upgrade your graphics card if you want to get a bit more performance from your PC.

Not only this, but modern GPUs fulfil a broad computational workload beyond just rendering, making them an extension to the central processing unit.