> And if you’re building a PC now after having been out of the game for a few years, it can be exceptionally confusing. No kidding. I've been out of the "hard

> And if you’re building a PC now after having been out of the game for a few years, it can be exceptionally confusing. No kidding. I've been out of the "hardware game" for quite a few years now, having not built a PC in probably 15 years (and pretty much exclusively buying laptops for the last 10 or so). That was very apparent when I decided a few months ago to build myself a new server and began investigating options. I was surprised by one thing in particular, though. According to TFA, the 4000-series (Haswell) are "the old chips". My primary machine for almost the last four years (until I bought a shiny new MacBook Pro back in mid-September) was a Lenovo Thinkpad W530 with an i7-3740QM chip. That is, AFAICT, one generation OLDER than "the old chips". Nearly four years after I bought it, however, it remains the most powerful machine I own and still has better specs than most of the brand new laptops I see for sale at a quick glance. It has four cores at 2.70 GHz, 32 GB of RAM, and a pair of Samsung 850 PRO 256 GB SSDs (just installed within the last two weeks). The screen is nice and pretty, too, with full HD (1920x1080 resolution). It's still a monster of a laptop today. I opted for the biggest battery I could get in it and, at a guess, it's still probably at 75-80% (capacity-wise) of what it was on day one (battery life isn't one of FreeBSD's strengths, but it's acceptable). Compare that to the 15" MacBook Pro I bought in September which has a quad-core i7 at 2.20 GHz, 16 GB of RAM, and 256 GB of whatever newfangled storage technology (PCIe, I think?) Apple shoved in it. The screen resolution (2880x1800 vs 1920x1080) is higher although the difference isn't that noticeable unless you're really looking. I am confused by one thing in TFA, though. It states, under the "Core i5" heading: > These are all quad-core CPUs ... I'm not sure if the article is wrong, I'm "misremembering" or what, but ISTR seeing plenty of i5 CPUs that are only dual core. One thing is for sure, though, the identifying/labeling and marketing of CPUs is confusing as hell (and will probably only get worse). Fortunately, when building my new server recently, I found some posts online by others who were building very similar machines and was able to benefit from their knowledge. I considered myself very lucky when I managed to buy components that all worked together perfectly the first time and didn't have to return or exchange anything. If you're going to be putting a new machine together anytime soon, definitely spend some time doing some research and make sure you purchase components that are compatible. It's amazing how much difference there can be between two similar pieces of hardware whose model numbers differ by only one digit or letter.