Upgrading your Custom Computer

As your computer ages you might find that your hardware can’t keep up with the demands of modern software. If you use your computer for gaming you’ll see this much more clearly because AAA games (i.e. the big-name game releases, such as Fallout, Call of Duty, Bioshock, Battlefield, CS:GO etc.) demand the capabilities of hardcore hardware. Other games may demand as much hardware capability as the AAA games, but often they do not. You’ll find yourself playing games at lower quality settings, at a smaller resolution, or with a slower frame rate than when you were playing games and your computer was new. Or perhaps if you’re not a gamer, you’ll just notice sluggish performance from your computer. So what are you to do?

 

The obvious answer is to upgrade, but before you do that you should do your due diligence and perform some PC maintenance. You should be doing basic computer maintenance continuously, but just in case you haven’t you should start with that before doing any upgrades to your computer. First I recommend a virus and malware scan. There are many free anti-virus programs available like AVG and Avast. Some of the better well-known anti-virus options like Norton and McAfee can cause more harm than good as they take up a lot of resources and will stop working after your subscription is up.

Historically a defragging your computer was recommended, but modern operating systems tend to do this automatically, and in fact this is dangerous for SSDs. Look through your installed software and delete anything you don’t use. Take a look at your task manager and process list to see which applications are taking up a lot of your memory and CPU. See if these are necessary and delete them if not.

If that didn’t do the trick and you’re still getting poor performance from your computer I’d say it’s time to upgrade. The obvious first thing to upgrade is the RAM. As a general guide you should have about 4GB of memory per processor core. This isn’t always possible. Check to see what the maximum amount of RAM your system (motherboard and chipset) will allow. More is always better.

If you’re serious about upgrading your computer and RAM didn’t help much I recommend benchmarking your computer. 3DMark 11 is a free and popular program that will run many separate 3D simulations. Running all of the different simulations and you’ll get scores that will tell you if your system is limited by the CPU or the graphics card.

 

Upgrading the graphics card is easy. Identify what your budget for an upgrade is and buy one from the latest generation from either AMD or Nvidia. I’m not going to get into which one is better (or if any of them are better than the other). Just know that Nvidia has a nasty habit of limiting performance on their older products and inhibiting performance on AMD cards on games that use their software, such as HairWorks. Let’s just say there’s a lot to be read up on the subject. If you are using a liquid cooling system in your computer that includes the graphics card, upgrading this component may be difficult.

Upgrading the CPU should be your last step. Some say it’s not worth it and you should just consider a new computer at this point. Newer chipsets may have significant advantages of the one you have. First, I would look up the chipset to determine what CPU socket it has and which processors it supports. For example let’s say you have a 4^th generation Intel Core i3 in an LGA 1150 socket. Luckily you can choose to upgrade to an i5 or i7 from the same generation. Upgrading the CPU is tricky, as you’ll have to remove the CPU cooler, remove the CPU from the motherboard, and install a new CPU.