this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
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I’ve started seeing people, who really should know better, referring to the PC tower as the CPU. As in, “I bought a bracket that mounts to my variable height desk which can hold my CPU up off the floor and let it move with my desk”.
Bro I’m looking at a picture of a custom water cooled PC here, you should know the fucking difference between a CPU and a computer case.
Eh, that's been a thing for a long time. Decades at least.
I think that the problem is that there isn't really a great term to clearly refer to the "non-monitor-and-peripherals" part of the "computer". "Case" would refer to just the case, not what's in it. "Tower" or "desktop" is overspecific, refers to particular form factors. I have a tower, but some people have under-monitor desktops (though that's rare today) or various times of small form factor PCs. If I say "computer", that doesn't really clearly exclude peripherals.
And honestly, we don't really use the term "GPU" quite correctly either. I'll call a whole PCI video card a "GPU", but I suppose that strictly-speaking, that should only be talking about a specific chip on the card.
8 bit games would label the computer player as CPU as a shorthand, I honestly probably got snapped at by a nerd sometime in my teens for making the mistake and got the central processing unit lecture so I don’t really make that association but I also never heard anyone pronounce “NES” not as an acronym prior to YouTube, so, I figure different people have different experiences also.
At one time I remember people commonly referring to the case as the hard drive.
I learned everything about how to build a PC from buildapc... like 12 years ago. Nowadays it has been infested by idiots who don't know shit but act like they do, and also think more RGB = more better.
I don't know what happened, but I put together a PC for the first time in some years, and holy mother of God, all the components have RGB LEDs slapped on them now. I had to actively work to find parts that didn't have RGB LEDs on them (and I still accidentally wound up with some on the motherboard). I mean, yeah, LED case fans have been a thing for a while, and there was always a contingent that put electroluminescent strips on their computers. And it kinda grew into a lot of keyboards and mice. But now it's a large portion of CPU fans, most cases, RAM sticks have RGB LEDs, motherboards have RGB LEDs. I didn't have trouble finding non-RGB LED NVMe storage, or non-RGB LED SATA drives, but even there, you can get them. Hell, there are RGB LED cables.
I can only assume that a large portion of the people building PCs these days are doing it to have them physically blinged up.
Like, nothing wrong with wanting to do that, but I couldn't believe the tiny proportion that wasn't doing that.
I actually like having lights on the keyboard. Mostly because I can find rarely used keys in the dark.
The only way my box is blinged up is with tastefully beige-brown fans. I actually felt slightly betrayed by Noctua when they started making black fans.
You know what? They're technically correct. There's historically plenty of computer systems which came in multiple different cases, sometimes that's still the case but the most obvious examples are historical, where you would get something like the CPU (yes) in one case and then a huge-ass card reader in another case and drum memory in yet another. Those drums were used as RAM. Each case was standing on the floor, at least chest-high.
Simply integrating various peripherals into the CPU doesn't make the CPU any less of the CPU. Even ignoring the case thing and just looking at the CPU package (or even die): Modern CPUs contain a lot of things that would've been external to it, or even in a different case, in the past. You'll hear the term "SoC", system on a chip, thrown around but that's misleading most CPUs nowadays are SoCs: You have your CPU cores, yes, but you also have a memory controller, you have storage interfaces and general IO (PCIe is a storage interface), as well as a GPU. It's been a long time since mainboards came with northbridges. Newer CPUs may have enough memory on package to reasonably run without external memory (and not just "use the cache as ram during early boot" kind of stuff).