Performance Factors

Connecting various peripherals can have a great impact on the computers performance, either boosting or reducing it. Only one device can communicate on the data bus at a time so having lots of peripherals connected to the bus through controllers will mean there will be less free time on the data bus for devices.

Also peripherals such as monitors can consume a lot of processing power to render an image at high frame rate but using peripherals such as a graphics card can offload the processing from the lower power controller. Some peripherals may improve the systems performance such as using a network card may improve the connection speed available but the greater speed will need greater processing power.