Practical advice for upgrading
There are plenty of reasons why we upgrade. They can range from the essential to the vain, from the aspirational to the vital. An upgrade may allow you to hit better frame rates in your favorite games, or give your system enough raw grunt to tackle a title that it couldn’t before. If you use your machine for more serious work, an upgrade may allow you to get more done in a shorter space of time, or even do things that you wouldn’t have been able to do with your current system.
A reasonable rule of thumb is: if you find yourself waiting for your machine to finish a task, then it could probably do with an upgrade. Whether that’s rendering a video, applying an effect to an image, booting, loading an application or website — anything, really. Your time is precious, so don’t squander it waiting. And it doesn’t have to be a hardware upgrade that you need; turning to better software or tweaking the software you’re already running could also be an option — but we’ll come to that shortly.
Of course, there tends to be something holding most of us back when it comes to pulling the trigger on constantly upgrading, and that’s the cost. Weighing up the benefits against the price tag is just as important as working out what and the frequencies have been creeping up reasonably slowly as well. So even if your CPU is a few generations out of date, that’s no guarantee that a CPU upgrade will transform your PC. Indeed, as we found in one of our case studies over the page, a decent CPU from quite a few years ago can still stand its ground against newer chips in practical terms.
There is a fairly major caveat here, though, which is that newer processors support newer technologies, aka the chipsets, and in terms of the bigger picture, this could make a CPU and motherboard upgrade a far more attractive option. M.2 NVMe drives, for instance, can hit transfer rates of 3.5GB/s, as opposed to a lowly SATA SSD, which sits at a meager 550MB/s. those hardware updates should be. If your budget can extend to getting the very best component in each category, then all power to you, but most of us can’t afford to maintain such an aggressive upgrade regime. If you know that you’re going to have to change out several vital components, then planning your upgrade makes sense — buying a graphics card that will still be relevant when you change up your processor and motherboard later, for example.
Knowing what you want from an upgrade is key, because without that knowledge, you’re just chasing the next biggest and brightest thing, without taking stock of whether it actually makes sense. Working out what you want to do also enables you to focus on the component or subsystem that will have the greatest impact.
For instance, we wouldn’t normally recommend that you spend your time and money upgrading your memory, because for the vast majority of uses, 8GB is enough (or even 4GB, if you’re dealing with a much older machine). However, if you’re multitasking a lot, editing multiple 4K images and messing around with UHD video, then doubling up to 16GB or even 32GB could reap real benefits.