What Is My CPU Speed: How Do I Find It?

Your CPU speed, also known as the speed of your computer processor, determines how fast everything happens on your computer. If your CPU speed is slow, there isn’t much you can do about it (although we will discuss some options later). If your CPU speed is fast, then you’ll enjoy playing the latest games and be more productive than your peers.
How To Find Your CPU Speed

Finding your CPU speed on Windows is easy:

Go to the start menu.
Right-click the My Computer link for Windows XP or “Computer” for Vista and Windows Seven.
Choose Properties from the context menu that appears.
Your computer processor’s brand name and CPU speed will be displayed.
To properly determine your CPU speed, you need a few extra pieces of information. Using the tabs above the information screen you just accessed, switched to the Hardware screen and find the listing for your CPU. Detailed information about your CPU speed will be displayed here, including how many processors you have and whether they’re 32 or 64 bit processors.



So What’s Your Real CPU Speed?

Interpreting the data you just found can be a little difficult because of a feature in some processors called hyper-threading. Hyper-threading lets one processor pretend to be two processors, which can provide a minor speed boost to some applications.

To figure out whether your processor has hyper-threading, search Google or Wikipedia for the name of your processor as displayed on the screen you just looked at. If it has hyper-threading, divide the number of processors displayed by two. (For example, my Dad’s computer shows four processors, but he has hyper-threading, so the correct number of processors is two.)[easyazon-image-link asin="B004EBUXSA" alt="Intel Core i7-2600K Processor 3.4GHz 8 MB Cache Socket LGA1155" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51gvmvH14TL._SL160_.jpg" align="right" width="127" height="160"]

Now that you know how many processors you have, you can do a little bit more math to determine your total CPU speed. Multiply the CPU speed you saw on the first screen (usually printed in megahertz [MHz] or gigahertz [GHz]) by the number of processors you have. For example, 2 times 1.33 GHz equals 2.66 GHz.