If you are familiar with PC games, then you must know that newer games are generally heavier and harder to run. This can be quite an issue if you have an old gaming PC and it cannot keep up with newer titles. Thankfully, unlike a gaming laptop, gaming PCs can be easily upgraded to improve their performance. And today, we are here with the following 6 easy ways to upgrade your gaming PC:
Upgrade to an SSD
Those of you who are using an older gaming PC are most likely using a hard drive as their primary boot drive. This includes installing both your operating system as well as games on the drive.
Because hard drives are quite slow because of their mechanical design, this can result in long game loading times. In fact, in some cases, it can even cause issues with the textures in the game that you are playing.
Thankfully, you can easily get over this issue by upgrading to an SSD which are fairly affordable these days. Even if you go with a SATA SSD, you can expect speeds of 500-600 MB/s which are much higher than 100-150 MB/s speeds offered by most hard drives.
Install a Newer Graphics Card
The biggest upgrade that you can make to a gaming PC to improve its performance is to get a new graphics card. Even though there are a lot of components and factors that play an important role in playing games on your computer, the graphics card handles all of the rendering and game graphics.
As a result, if you have an old or an entry-level graphics card, running modern games on it will not be possible. Hence, you can consider getting either a new or a used graphics card for your computer.
Also read: RTX Vs. GTX Graphics cards
If you wish to play games at 1080p resolution, a GPU like an RTX 2060 or an RTX 3060 should be more than enough for years to come. And if you are going with a used GPU, something like a GTX 1070 or GTX 1080 is good enough to play games at ultra graphics at 1080p resolution.
Upgrade your Memory
Similar to any other program, all of the games that you play on your gaming PC also store all their data on the main memory or the RAM of your computer. And if you do not have enough memory, then modern games will either not run at all or cause a lot of stuttering issues.
Therefore, it is quite important that you have 8 GB or more RAM in your gaming PC. Fortunately, not only is memory fairly affordable, but it is also quite easy to install.
Most gaming PC motherboards have 2 or 4 RAM slots that you can use to easily upgrade to either 8 GB or 16 GB RAM for much better gaming as well as computing experience.
Get a new CPU and Motherboard Combo
While the graphics card definitely plays a major role in running modern gaming titles on your computer, upgrading that alone might not be enough in some cases. This is due to the reason that if you are using an outdated CPU, it might bottleneck your GPU.
In other words, if you are not using a powerful CPU, then you will not be able to get the most out of your graphics card. Unfortunately, unlike a GPU, upgrading your CPU most likely means that you will also need a new motherboard making it one of the more expensive PC upgrades. It is due to the reason that newer CPU models are not compatible with motherboards older than 1 or 2 generations.
But if you upgrade them both to even a Ryzen 5 5600x or an Intel Core i5 11600K along with a compatible motherboard, it will be more than enough for many years to come. You can even pair such CPU models with high end
Improve the Cooling of your PC
In case you already have powerful components inside your gaming PC and are still facing performance issues, then it is most likely that your computer has heating issues. And if your gaming PC is heating up, then its components like the CPU and GPU will thermal throttle resulting in poor performance.
To overcome this issue, you can consider adding extra fans to your PC, getting a better CPU cooler, and re-applying the thermal paste with a better quality one.
Clean your PC
Other than upgrading the fans and the CPU cooler of your gaming PC, there is another way to improve its cooling performance. And unlike other PC upgrades, this one is completely free to try out. Over time, your gaming PC builds up a lot of dust inside it which can clog fans, the CPU cooler, and the GPU cooler. Hence, it is always a great idea to clean your PC every 3-4 months to improve its cooling as well as gaming performance. If you are cleaning your PC, it is also advisable to re-apply the thermal paste which can get dried up and result in heating issues.
Conclusion
With these 6 easy ways to upgrade your gaming PC, your gaming experience should be much better. Other than playing games, your computer will feel much faster and snappier in general once you have upgraded your gaming PC. In most cases, even 1-2 of these PC upgrades should be more than enough to run all modern PC games with high-end graphics. Although, if your computer is quite old, then it is most likely the time to get a new one with brand new parts.
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