Giving your PC some extra power doesn't have to be difficult, as this little show...
Keeping up with gaming is a difficult task. You can buy a top-of-the-line PC, and within months it's starting to creak under the demands of the latest titles. Buy a mid-level system, and by the time a year has passed, it's practically obsolete! Sometimes it seems like older systems barely have a chance.
But getting a gaming system doesn't mean you have to junk your existing PC and buy a new one. A few smart upgrades can put your system back in the business of playing games. Sometimes you don't even need to replace the hardware, just give it a little maintenance. Either way, if you want to squeeze some extra gaming performance out of your system, we’ve put together this list of tips, tricks and upgrades you can perform to help rejuvenate an otherwise ailing PC.
1 If You Don't Have A Graphics Card, Add One
The quickest way to turn any system into an instant gaming machine is to add a graphics card. On-board GPUs might be cheap, but they're not designed for gaming at any serious level. A separate GPU will, in almost every case, offer a considerable performance improvement on an integrated one.
Any system of reasonable ability - even Core i3s and low-end AMD chips - will become passable gaming systems once you put a graphics card in. While the exact card you buy depends on how much performance the integrated GPU you're using can provide, even older GeForce and Radeons should blow away an on-board chip. Look around the £75-£100 price bracket.
Adding a graphics card isn't even a very difficult procedure when you buy cards at this end of the market. Powerful GPUs require attention to things like internal cooling and power requirements, but cheaper cards can easily run off all but the most weedy PSUs and rarely get to hot to use.
2 If You Do Have A Graphics Card, Upgrade It
Having a graphics card is one thing, but sometimes the quickest route to improving your gaming is to choose a better one. Modern CPUs are more than capable of meeting the demands games place on them in terms of processing power - it's the visuals that slow your system down.
As a rule, if you're upgrading, you want to make sure the model numbers are all higher than your current card. That way you know you're not buying anything slower! RAM amounts aren't such a big deal - GDDR5 is better than DDR3, but more RAM is always better, regardless of speed. Aim for at least 2GB - anything lower is going to be out of date.
As hinted earlier, high-end cards do come with attendant concerns, the most pressing of which is the issue of power. If you have a card that needs its own internal power supply directly from the PSU, check that your existing unit can handle it before you do anything else. A PSU of 500 watts should be enough to run a decent card, but the most high-end may need up to a 700W PSU to be present.
3 Install An SSD
You may not be aware, but a lot of the frame-stutter and pop-in you experience when playing a game isn't caused by an inadequate CPU or slow graphics card; it's caused by the amount of time it takes to fetch the data from your hard drive and load it into memory. It might be only fractions of a second, but that's enough to make it visible.
This is why SSDs can improve the speed at which your games run. The fast read and write times allow SSDs to shift data around your system faster than any hard drive could hope to, removing the data-transfer bottleneck. Even the slowest, most bog-standard SSD will be exponentially quicker than a standard mechanical hard drive, so as upgrades go they're a guaranteed winner.
Admittedly, there are practical difficulties inherent in an SSD upgrade that might put you off. To get optimal performance from one you'll need to be running Windows off it (since the Windows cache also slows down games), so not only do you have to install an SSD physically; you have to transfer Windows to it and make it your primary drive.
Similarly, the space constraints might also put you off. You might enjoy having a terabyte-class hard drive to install your games on, and having it bumped back down to something measured in gigabytes could be a rude awakening. You can still run your old drive alongside the SSD, of course!
4 Improve Your CPU
A new CPU is always worth considering, not just because it improves in-game performance, but because it improves your system generally. Admittedly, CPUs are rarely the cause of gaming bottlenecks, but if you have a good graphics card and a good SSD, then they're one of the only other definite sources of improvement you can turn to.
Of course, the problem with most chip upgrades is that you're either limited to small improvements within your current generation of chip, or you have to swap a motherboard out as well. A better idea might be to overclock your existing CPU, assuming your hardware supports the ability.
To overclock a chip, you need a К-series CPU (which denotes unlocked speeds in both AMD and Intel chip) and a motherboard capable of taking advantage of this state. There are risks associated with overclocking: the chip runs hotter, which makes it less stable and more prone to damage, so you may need to spend money on a new cooling system to maintain the quality of performance you're accustomed to. It's not a perfect solution, but when the alternative is essentially rebuilding your entire PC from the ground up, this might be a better approach.
5 Add More RAM
The effect of additional RAM on gaming is quite modest in most cases, and beyond a certain point it could even be described as negligible. Most games don’t use more than a gigabyte or two of RAM, and instead rely more heavily on the graphics memory over the system memory.
The best time to install more RAM is if you're running an integrated GPU, because then the system memory is the graphics memory, and low system RAM can therefore have a negative effect on games. Similarly, if you have such an exceptionally small amount of RAM that your operating system struggles to keep up, another stick or two will improve your gaming performance.
Generally speaking, if you're running a 64-bit version of Windows, you should have 4GB of RAM as the absolute minimum for a functional system. 8GB is the minimum amount you need to run your operating system and games comfortably, so if you have less than that, you probably will see a small improvement in your gaming benchmarks by adding more.
Above that point, the likelihood that more RAM will effect a visible improvement becomes smaller and smaller. 16GB is vastly more than any gaming system needs and is only likely to be of benefit to systems with heavy RAM usage such as media editing systems.
Still, we appreciate that the promise of a RAM upgrade can be tempting; it's easy to install and inexpensive. Just don’t let the simplicity fool you into thinking it's definitely worth doing. Spend your money wisely!