Desktop PC: how to choose the right configuration
Office work, gaming, creative work: each use pushes toward a different configuration, and it's easy to overpay for a component you won't use.
Office work and browsing: RAM and SSD matter more than the processor
For office work, web browsing, and video calls, nearly any recent processor is enough. What you actually feel day to day is the amount of RAM (16 GB is comfortable today) and having an SSD instead of a traditional hard drive — an SSD radically changes boot times and how fast apps open.
Gaming: the graphics card makes the difference, not the processor alone
For gaming under good conditions, it's the dedicated graphics card (GPU) that determines smoothness and achievable graphics quality, far more than the processor. A PC with an excellent processor but no dedicated GPU will stay limited for recent games, no matter how many cores it advertises.
Content creation: memory and fast storage count double
For video editing, photo retouching, or 3D work, the amount of RAM and storage speed (NVMe SSD rather than SATA) have a direct impact on how comfortable it is to work — exporting a video or opening a large file can go from several minutes down to a few seconds depending on the configuration.
Compare based on your use, not the most impressive spec sheet
The comparison tool's "Best performance" guided mode weighs processor, graphics card, RAM, and storage together — useful for avoiding paying for an oversized component for nothing while another one remains the real bottleneck for your actual use.