Advice for Building a Desktop

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Are RAM/GPUs still super expensive?

Pretty sure the RAM still is. Pre-builts have been stuck at 8(ish)gb for a while

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Kind of also wonder if processors have been getting faster after that speculative exectution nightmare

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The processor is "Intel Cor i7-6700K CPU @ 4.00GHz", and it says that 8 times so I guess I have 8 of them?

You most likely have one processor with four computational units (cores) that are able to perform trickery on the code they run to make your OS think you have 8 cores.

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To answer your question of performance, wait for driver and borderlands updates before you think about buying anything. Pushing out a new game always brings a slew of PC issues. It's really tough to get one codebase to work correctly on millions of different machines.

[Flubbernugget]

The processor is "Intel Cor i7-6700K CPU @ 4.00GHz", and it says that 8 times so I guess I have 8 of them?

You most likely have one processor with four computational units (cores) that are able to perform trickery on the code they run to make your OS think you have 8 cores.

See, I don’t even know what the hell that means

I can explain when I have time!

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Ok

Inside your computer is a bunch of hardware, arguably the most important of which is the central processing unit, or CPU. The CPU is a thin square flat on one side and covered in pins to connect to the motherboard on the other side. You usually can't directly see it when it's installed on the motherboard because it's covered by a fan and a heatsink, but if you crack open a motherboard and see a big ass fan sticking out of the whole thing that's probably where the CPU is.

At an obnoxiously high level, the CPU's job is to run programs. More specifically, it performs instructions fed to it from a hard drive. When you turn your computer on, open a web browser, or do whatever, you're observing the consequences of these instructions being executed.

Different processors can execute instructions at different speeds. A faster processor can execute more inductions than a slower one in the same amount of time (Think about what this means for video games, which are insanely complicated and therefore require a massive amount of instructions to run). This speed is measured in the number of instructions a processor can perform in one second as a frequency, and is therefore measured in hertz. Looking at popsofctown's post, you can see their processor can execute 4 billion instructions in a second. Impressive stuff!

Now from here we have to explain cores, things get a little more complicated. Traditionally, a processor would execute instructions one at a time, in order from start to finish. This translates to only one program running at a time. Obviously your computer can run a web browser with a few tabs while a word document is loaded in the background and so on. Windows itself is normally running a hundred or so programs just to keep everything up an running. How is this possible?
It turns out there's a few ways to create the

illusion

that two sets of instructions are running at the same time. What you do is tell the processor to run one set of instructions, and instead of running them to completion, you schedule time for the two sets to run. When the instructions run out of time, a new set of instructions is loaded into the processor to run. This switching of processes happens so fast it looks like the instructions are running at the same time. You can break this illusion by loading a program that's too computationally intensive for the processor to run and see that the whole computer locks up (im sure everyone has done this at least once before).

Originally, intel and others tried to make computers handle more instructions by upping the speed of the processor so it could run more instructions in a scheduled amount of time before it had to switch. At around the 3-4ghz range this caused too many heat issues that noone was able to mitigate. To help speed up processors, the concept of

multiple cores

became more popular. Giving a processor more cores gave it the availability to actually run sets of instructions simultaneously. If you had two cores you could run two sets of instructions and so forth. You don't get twice the processing power if you double your cores (it's closer to a 30% increase in speed and I can explain a little bit of why if anyone is interested), but it's still significant enough that it gets listed as part of most processor's system specifications.

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The tl;dr is that clock speeds (ghz) and cores are the main indicators of a processor's performance. There's a few others like cache size but they normally take a little more digging to find the specs