&gt; <i>And if you’re building a PC now after having been out of the game for a few years, it can be exceptionally confusing.</i><p>No kidding.  I&#x27;ve been out of the &quot;hardware game&quot; 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.<p>I was surprised by one thing in particular, though.  According to TFA, the 4000-series (Haswell) are &quot;the <i>old</i> chips&quot;.  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 <i>OLDER</i> than &quot;the <i>old</i> chips&quot;.<p>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&#x27;s still a monster of a laptop today.  I opted for the biggest battery I could get in it and, at a guess, it&#x27;s still probably at 75-80% (capacity-wise) of what it was on day one (battery life isn&#x27;t one of FreeBSD&#x27;s strengths, but it&#x27;s acceptable).<p>Compare that to the 15&quot; 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&#x27;t <i>that</i> noticeable unless you&#x27;re really looking.<p>I am confused by one thing in TFA, though.  It states, under the &quot;Core i5&quot; heading:<p>&gt; <i>These are all quad-core CPUs ...</i><p>I&#x27;m not sure if the article is wrong, I&#x27;m &quot;misremembering&quot; or what, but ISTR seeing plenty of i5 CPUs that are only dual core.<p>One thing is for sure, though, the identifying&#x2F;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&#x27;t have to return or exchange anything.<p>If you&#x27;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&#x27;s amazing how much difference there can be between two similar pieces of hardware whose model numbers differ by only one digit or letter.