[Riva710]

It's often taught that Central Processing Units (CPUs), Graphic Processing Units/Cards (GPUs) and Random Access Memory (RAM) make up the core components of hardware when it comes to media performance, with larger memory capacities and clock speeds improving frames p/second, loading times and overall image quality.

Interestingly components (often GPUs) that on paper, have higher technical specs, from less respected manufacturers - such as Zotac or Asus, can be benchmarked with a lower score despite the obvious advantage in memory and speed - indicating that the quality of manufacture or material may also play a part in the overall capability.

It would be good to hear other opinions on key factors that contribute to overall performance, as it's clear that quite a bit of research can be done when making purchases during upgrades / PC builds.

[Goopygoober]

A point on your second paragraph is that if the cooler is poorly designed, it doesn’t matter what the paper specs are. A big factor to overall performance is switching from a hard drive to an ssd. It makes a massive difference in normal use.

[trash_omg]

cooling, firmware

[bleepblorp]

Bottlenecks are thing too, your hardware needs to matched in order to get the most out of it. And Ryzen CPUs in particular show big differences when paired with high speed RAM and lots of cooling.