How do the components of a computer other than the CPU affect the speed at which you can access the internet?

Answer 1

Actually, most components, including the CPU, have little effect on webpage loading. For example, if you underclock a Phenom II CPU to 450 MHz (from 2800 MHz) webpages still load at the same speed!

This is because webpage loading is a relatively quick process. Most webpages are 1 MB or less in size. The slowest component on your computer is the hard drive, which is where webpages download onto before displaying. (Some browsers may load into memory first, such as Chrome, Opera, and Safari, which is much faster) The harddrive is typically able to load data at 50 MB/s or as much as 120 MB/s. Meaning it takes less than 1/50th of a second to load the webpage off the slowest part of your computer!

Most modern computers' memory is even faster, averaging 8,000 MB/s to as much as 17,800 MB/s!

The real bottleneck, and the deciding factor in how fast a webpage loads is, in fact, your internet connection. Any computer on a slow internet connection will still load webpages slowly. As a general rule, Dial-up, Satellite, Wireless, Cellular, and ISDN connections are very slow. While Cable and DSL are standard speed, and FiOS, T1, T3, OC1, OC3, and other fiber lines are very, very fast. Internal networks such as LANs are also fast, averaging 100mbit/s to 1000mbit/s.

The CPU does, however, become involved if the website contains elements such as Java and Flash. These are performed client-side on your computer, whereas almost all other contents are done server-side by the website itself, rather than your computer. But even then, a 2.0 GHz Pentium4 or faster should be more than enough to load it at faster-than-human-blink speed. It's pretty much always your internet connection you'll be waiting on, and nothing else.

Games are totally different, however.