Supercharge Your Desktop: Simple Upgrades for a BLAZING PERFORMANCE BOOST

What has kept enthusiasts coming back to the desktop computer time and again is that it’s the ultimate upgradeable PC. It’s almost like a blank canvas you can transform over and over again. That’s what has kept me coming back to the desktop, and it’s one of the main reasons I never want to go back to laptops. Choosing what upgrades to do to get the biggest bangs for your bucks can be difficult, but we’re here to help. In this roundup, we’ll outline the best upgrades you can do to your desktop to give it the power boost it needs.

GIVE YOUR PC a Swift Kick with an SSD UPGRADE

The biggest leap forward in making your system faster is going from an HDD to an SSD. The jump in speed here is so much bigger than generations of CPUs and GPUs that you can most easily see it when you boot up or load a game. There’s no chance you have a speedometer that goes to 100 or even 1,000, but it sure feels like you’re watching one switch from minutes to seconds. The same goes for copying files from one drive to another or saving to a cloud service. Even if you can’t see the numbers, you’ll still feel the time savings. NVMe SSDs are still the fastest, but a SATA SSD is a huge step up from an HDD. The fastest way to give your system an instant performance bump is to get an SSD.

The Memory BOOST: Bumping Up Your GPU's VRAM

You might not be able to get the full effect of graphical fidelity without it and, if you were to upgrade your GPU, it would make your games smoother and more immersive to boot. But what really makes a good GPU future-proof is its VRAM. VRAM is the fast memory that holds textures on your GPU – and the more VRAM you put in, the more your computer can handle. If you want to invest in a GPU upgrade, you should do so with the knowledge that your hardware will scale with the graphical requirements of games for a longer period of time than if you bought a GPU with slim graphics processing specs, which would lead to a drop-off in your gaming experience relatively quickly.

RAM UPGRADES: From Basic to BEAST MODE

If you want to make your PC’s experience an entirely better one, then upgrading your RAM to 32GB from 16GB could make a world of difference. Multitasking becomes smoother, gaming becomes faster (to match with some of the new AAA titles), and your whole experience becomes more enjoyable. The upgrade also lessens the shudders and jitters that come with limited RAM, so while you are upgrading to make your PC run better, you are upgrading your gaming experience as well. 32GB of RAM is a small upgrade to make to your computer, and it’s an excellent one to make if you are looking into completely upgrading your system.

Cool Off with a High-Performance COOLER

There are just no two ways about it, proper thermal management is the key to keeping the juice flowing at full pace, so a decent cooler is money well spent. In fact, any PC that uses its CPU to its full potential should expect to see immediate temperature drops and gains in stability as soon as the supplied stock cooler is dropped in favour of something with a little muscular grunt, be it a larger fan or a liquid cooling solution. This wouldn’t be the case if heat wasn’t a bottleneck in the first place. A cooler boost equals better performance but it also equals a longer lifespan for your components.

BOOST Insights: Understanding the Impact

Something that my father and I agree on is that the essence of every PC upgrade journey is ensuring a balance of components that together serve to improve the overall performance of the system. When people talk about getting a ‘boost’ from an upgrade, it might refer to speed, but it has more to do with running the system more efficiently and allowing it to run at maximum capacity for longer, be it with something as significant as a graphics processor upgrade or as subtle as an upgrade to a cooler. Your PC is only as fast as its slowest component, and this means that every upgrade is subtly different in what boost it provides when it gets added to the system’s setup. There’s nothing worse than someone who doesn’t have a clue telling you what you should spend your hard-earned money on in order to make your PC faster. Knowing which upgrade will give the greatest boost to your system is a useful way of knowing where to spend money, and it will hopefully let you resist some ludicrously expensive or extravagant purchases that will do very little to improve your desktop.

And that’s the end of your journey towards a new desktop. A super desktop? No. Is it expensive? Not at all. But the point is: it’s effective, and there you have it. Build your own upgrade methodology, and you’ll have a super desktop.