i just upgraded this year, to an r9 5900x, from my old r5 2600, still running a 1070 though.
I do video editing and more generally CPU intensive stuff on the side, as well as a lot of multitasking, so it’s worth the money, in the long run at least.
I also mostly play minecraft, and factorio, so.
ryzen 5000 is a great upgrade path for those who don’t want to buy into am5 yet. Very affordable. 7000 is not worth the money, unless you get a good deal, same for 9000, though you could justify it with a new motherboard and ram.
I’m rocking a 5800X and see no reason to go to 7000 or no 9000 anytime soon. It’s been great since I built the PC.
My PC was made in 2014 and i upgraded it but it died in 2022 due to mishandling. If you keep your PC clean and don’t move it it can last even longer!
I’m the one person who people go to for PC part advice, but I actually try to talk them down. Like, do you need more RAM because your experience is negatively impacted by not having enough, or do you just think you should have more just because?
Ha, I had this exact conversation with a friend of mine a few days ago, he wants to upgrade from 16GB to 32GB and when I asked why, he just blanked out for a while and went “…because more is better, right?”
He spends most of his time playing rpg maker porn games and raid shadow legend, also really taxing that RTX 3070 he bought right in the middle of the pandemic.
if you had a top of the line pc in 2014 you’d be talking about a 290x/970/980 which would probably work really well for most games now. For CPU that’d be like a 4th gen intel or AMD Bulldozer which despite its terrible reputation probably runs better nowadays thanks to better multi-threading.
A lot of the trending tech inflating minimum requirements nowadays are stuff like raytracing (99% of games don’t even need it) and higher FPS/resolution monitors that aren’t that relevant if you’re still pushing 1080p/60. Let’s not even begin with Windows playing forced obsolescence every few years.
Hell, most games that push the envelope of minimum specs like Indiana Jones are IMO just unoptimised messes built on UE5 than legitimately out of scope of hardware from the last decade. Stuff like Ninite hasn’t delivered in enabling photorealistic asset optimisation but HAS enabled studios to cut back on artist labour in favour of throwing money at marketing.
You have to try really hard to even notice Ray tracing in a lot of games. Well except for your fps halving, that’s pretty noticeable.
I’m still using the i7 I built up back in 2017 or so… Upgraded to SSD some years ago, will be upping the ram to 64gigs (max the mb can handle) in a few days when it arrives…
I originally built my current PC back in 2016 and only just “upgraded” it last year. I put upgrade in quotes because it was literally a free motherboard and GPU my buddy no longer needed. I went from a Core i5 6600K to a Ryzen 5 5500GT and a GTX960 4GB to a GTX1070. Still plays all the games I want it to, so I have no desire to upgrade it further right now. I think part of it is I’m still using 1080P 60Hz monitors.
I was running one from 2011 up until 2 years ago when I finally hit a wall in a game I was trying to play and had to upgrade the processor (which meant a new motherboard, which meant new everything). Prior to that I had only upgraded the GPU a couple years prior which i really didn’t need but it was a present to myself and I was able to give the old one to my brother. By the time this one is outdated I might not even be interested in computers anymore with the way things are going with technology.
If you don’t upgrade to Windows 11, you can’t use Recall, which is a great reason not to upgrade to Windows 11.
I upgraded to Linux. It worked out well for me since I mostly pay retro games and games from yesteryear.
I upgraded a Chromebook to Linux recently. That was a huge bump in performance that I wasn’t expecting, not even just for gaming.
What distro? Did you follow a guide?
installed Lubuntu 24 on it using a guide that loosely applied to the low end chromebook I have. Link here
Using chrome browser on ChromeOS was snappy but any other browser I used with addons was an awful and laggy experience. The difference in performance was an unexpected win, but I primarily did it to ditch SpywareOS.
Going forward I’m probably going to just look for chromebooks to convert to linux for a daily driver laptop because you dont have to pay a premium for the spyware like you do with a windows laptop
People want shiny new things. I’ve had relatives say stuff like “I bought this computer 2 years ago and it’s getting slower, it’s awful how you have to buy a new one so quickly.” I suggest things to improve it, most of which are free or very cheap and I’d happily do for them. But they just go out and buy a brand new one because that’s secretly what they wanted to do in the first place, they just don’t want to admit they’re that materialistic.
Can I have some tips too?
Appreciate the meme but yea that is one way to probably improve performance. Or upgrade the RAM, clean the fans, reapply thermal compound, clear out temporary files, disable unused services or reinstall Windows if they really need it just to run Chrome and Zoom which is all they do.
Even just blowing out all the dust from a passive cooler (under the CPU fan) can make your system run a good 10°C cooler.
hardware isn’t as impactful to performance as software imo, just getting rid of bloat services can improve the perceived performance for every day tasks a ton.
btw I don’t really get why increasing the amount of ram is thought of as the first step by most normie consumers, if you have enough it’s enough and even my 2gb machine runs everything fine
You’d be amazed at the startup and program opening time gains on older computers’ when you change in the HDD that is stuck at read/write speeds of 5MB/s for a SSD
oh yeah SSDs are great, but RAM, thermals, etc don’t matter much
If RAM upgradable to dual channel it could still make a big difference
Clean the fans.
Reinstall the os clean. That’s usually why a new computer feels snappy: it’s just fresh.
Also dont forget to reapply thermal paste. Might help with overheating.
No chance I’m advising normies to mess with thermal paste on their own.
Free:
- clean fans and heatsink - others mentioned, and the reason is better cooling so it doesn’t throttle
- kill unnecessary services - that’s why reinstalling works
- install Linux - not reasonable for everyone, but Linux uses far fewer resources
- delete old files - as disks get full, it takes longer to find somewhere for files to go; try to leave 10-20% free
- try a small overclock - many older CPUs can give a little more without upgrading cooling; only do it if temps look good
Relatively cheap (<$200 each):
- upgrade drive to NVMe - huge difference if running an HDD, still noticeable of running a SATA SSD
- add more RAM (only if you’re constantly running out)
- upgrade CPU - esp if AMD since they release lots of CPUs for the same socket
It really depends on what’s making it slow though.
for deleting files qdirstat/windirstat are insanely good pieces of software
I have heard that Windows underclocks your CPU over time, to make you buy a new computer, and so Microsoft can get money from the new PC’s preinstalled Windows license.
I am not really sure if that’s true though.
I have heard that Windows underclocks your CPU over time
I would say this is half true. Microsoft is known for pushing lots of software updates with unwanted features, so it’s probably that a computer will feel slower over time.
However that’s not an underclock it’s just that the CPU can’t keep up with that much bloatware.
People live in times of historic standstill. Society barely develops in a meaningful and hopeful way. Social relationships stagnate or decline. So they look for a feeling of progress and agency in participation in the market and consuming.
They don’t realize this because they aren’t materialistic enough, in a sense that they don’t analyse their condition as a result of political and cultural configuration of their lives so that real agency seems unavailable
The experience of playing modern games on a modern AAA “high end” PC is obviously going to be better if you care about things like ray-tracing and high framerates or resolution. You can’t really dispute that.
But it would be stupid to say you’re wrong if you just want to play that same game on your system if it actually runs. If the game is playable and you’re having fun, you’re doing it correctly.
I only upgrade when I start to see multiple games a year that just straight up don’t work on my computer.
Because you’re the lemming who isn’t running off the cliff. It pisses them off.
My 2009 i5 750 (oc at 3.6) can still play any game I throw at it.
That CPU started as a development Linux workstation, then as Windows gaming rig, then served couple of years as unRaid server and now runs a Windows 10 workstation for my mother in law. Still fast enough for everyday use.
My i7-920 lasted a lot longer than I ever thought it would. I still have it but i don’t need the power anymore since I don’t have time to PC game. Actually it was in a P6T v2 and I think I replaced it with a xeon processor.
any game I throw at it
easy to say when you never throw demanding AAA titles at it
IDK I have 200+ games and they all work. In terms of AAA I played all the recent Fallout, Doom, Tomb Raider and many others. I even played Hellblade in VR. Definitely good enough for me.
What sorta stuff do you play? I built an i5 2500k system a couple years back (2020-ish) and it struggled a fair bit, but was on the cusp of 1080p60 in the few games I tested like Fortnite, f1-2019, Warzone etc.
I just don’t play online games, never have. I can play pretty much any single player/coop game at medium/1080. Maybe most recent titles like Elden ring would struggle, but I have hundreds of games in my library and they all work fine.
I even made a small VR project with it although every manufacturers said it wouldn’t work. The GPU is a 1060.
Overall, I’ve spent around 600$ on this computer, over 15 years and it still a perfectly capable PC. I have another PC and Macbook for work, but the i5 has been our streaming/gaming pc for years.
One upside of AAA games turning into unimaginative shameless cash-grabs is that the biggest reason to upgrade is now gone. My computer is around 8 years old now. I still play games, including new games - but not the latest fancy massively marketed online rubbish games. (I bet there’s a funner backronym, but this is good enough for now.)
I use a gaming laptop from 2018. Rog Zephyrus.
fan started making grating noise even after thorough cleaning, found a replacement on Ebay and boom back in business playing Hitman and Stardew.
Will I get 120 fps or dominate multiplayer? nah. But yeah works fine. Might even be a hand me down later on.
Absolutely it totally depends on what you got originally. If you only got an okay ish PC in 2018 then it definitely still won’t be fit for purpose in 2025, but if you got a good gaming PC in 2018 it probably will still work in another 5 years, although at that point you’ll probably be on minimum settings for most new releases.
I would say 5 to 10 years is probably the lifespan of a gaming PC without an upgrade.
However my crappy work laptop needs replacing after just 3 years because it was rubbish to start with.
We replaced my mom’s warcraft machine 3 years ago. It replaced an athlonII from 2k7 at 14 years old. Your tank may be a 74yo grandmother so be nice.
I want to talk about writing 2k7 instead of 2007. It does save a character, but I also had to read it 3 times to understand lol but that might be a me problem
Also: do you only do that for 2000-2009, or do you write 2k25?
Also, Also: hope this doesn’t come across as rude. Ive never seen it written that way & find it interesting and a little funny.
Also, also, also: I think it’s sweet you helped your mom upgrade her computer so she could play WoW more effectively.
Oh yeah that’s what it means, I thought 2k7 was a company I’d never heard of.
And even then, a few strategic upgrades of key components could boost things again. New gfx card, a better SSD, more/faster RAM, any of those will do a lot.
High end gaming laptops are about a 5 year cycle, presuming you want everything ultra or high settings.
If you don’t care, my old laptop with a 7700k and a 1070 still runs almost anything, just not as well as brand new top end.
I built an overkill PC in February 2016, it was rocking a GTX 980ti a little before the 1080 came out, and it was probably the best GPU out there, factory overclocked and water cooled by EVGA. My CPU was an i5-4690k, which was solidly mid range then, but I overclocked it myself from 3.5GHz to 5.3Ghz with no issue, and only stopped there because I was so suspicious of how well it was handling that massive increase. I had 2TB of SSD spaceand like 8TB of regular hard drives and 16GB of ram.
Because I have never needed to think about space, and so many of my parts were really overpowered for their generation, I have always been hesitant to upgrade. I don’t play the newest games either, I still get max settings on Doom Eternal and Read Dead 2 which I forget are half a decade old. The only game where it’s struggled in low settings is Baldurs Gate 3 unfortunately, which is made me realise it’s ready to upgrade.
They’re mad they spent 1k$ on a gpu and still can’t do 4k without upscaling on the newest crapware games
My $90US AWOW mini with Celeron J4125, 8 gigs of shared memory, 128gig SSD seems to run FreeDoom as good as any of the other potatos them GamerBoi fancy water cooled custom boxes have…
Who needs more than freedoom?
