CPU-Z Processor Information Utility

I'm sure none of you really think you need to know that much about the processor in your computer. You might even brush off this post because you don't feel you need to know much. If that's the way you feel, I'm going to ask you a very simple question. Does the processor in your computer support the SSE2 instruction set? I bet very few of you even know what that means and even fewer know if their processor supports it or not. Once again, I bet many of you are saying "who cares".

So what if there was important software you wanted and it required this instruction set? In fact, that desired software flat out won't install on your computer without these instructions. Now I bet you really want to know the answer and you can find out in a couple of minutes without spending any money.

I guarantee you that you will want to know this information in the near future. So take a couple of minutes and find out now. The first step is to download the free CPU-Z utility. Once downloaded, install it and run it. You'll see a screen similar to the one below.

 

You'll note that I've added a couple of red marks to my screen shot. The red arrow points to the list of instruction sets supported by your processor. I've underlined the portion listing the SSE instruction sets (or at least the first few). You want to make sure that your list includes SSE including number up to at least 2.

Those of you who are real system geeks will probably appreciate a lot of the other information included. If you are simply going through this exercise because I told you to do it, you don't have to worry about anything else. If your system supports the SSE2 instruction set, just make a mental note of this. Those of you who have a system that doesn't support SSE2 may want to consider shopping for a new computer soon. I described my dream computer in a post last September.

I'm sure you are still wondering why this information is so important. I'll give you more details on this in a future post. Don't worry, it won't be that long. Just believe me that you'll want to know if your processor supports SSE2 and CPU-Z allows you to find the answer very quickly.