Yes, the PC had some memory where it stores the BIOS settings. This is powered by a battery on the motherboard so the memory is retained even when the PC is powered off.
Some PCs can take SDCards, though I guess that is really a form of SSD.
I don't think so. The CPU info is stored on the CPU i.e. when you do a hardware report the CPU info in the report was read from the CPU. Likewise any peripherals like GPUs.
The IOPS is the number of read or write instructions per second the disk can manage, so yes it is going to be a big factor starting Chrome because each of the random reads is one IOP.
But disk speed is heavily influenced by the caching algorithm a disk uses, especially for writes.
It's hard to pick out a single metric and say this is the important one.
I have something to do for ten minutes. Back soon ...
Those metrics are OK as a general guide e.g. a disk that scores highly is likely to feel faster than a disk that stores low, but it's only a general guide.
Are you asking just out of curiousity, or are you trying to choose a disk?
I've used lots of different disks and I struggle to see any difference between them in everyday use. When I last needed an SSD (for my laptop) I bought a Kingston A2000 SSD, this one, and it's been great.
I have a tendency to buy Western Digital SSDs as they bought the business from SanDisk and I have had nothing but good experiences from SanDisk SSDs. They are a bit more expensive though.
Optane is like an SSD but it's typically used as a cache for a mechanical drive.
The idea is that when you read from the mechanical drive you'll probably want to read from the same region of the drive next. So when you do a read the Optane cache copies a large chunk of data from the drive in the background.
Then when you do the next read there's a good chance the data you want is already in the Optane cache and the read will be very fast.
No. Optane can't be used as RAM. It only acts as a disk cache and it's only any use with a mechanical drive. SSDs don't benefit from Optane as they're already fast.
If you buy, e.g., a 3GHz CPU and run it at 3GHz then all the CPUs will be the same.
If you want to try and run the CPU at a higher frequency than its spec you can try, and some CPUs will be able to reach a higher frequency than others.
But honestly overclocking is mostly a waste of time and money.
First note that the Intel 10nm process is equivalent to the AMD 7nm process, and likewise the Intel 7nm process is equivalent to the AMD 5nm process. They measure the sizes in different ways. That's why they get different numbers.
And Intel do have their 10nm (i.e. AMD 7nm) process working. It's just that they screwed up somewhere and they were very slow to get it working.
