January brought a lot of CPU options to our attention from AMD and Intel, and as a result we’ve made a whole host of changes to the processor column of our main chart!
January brought a lot of CPU options to our attention from AMD and Intel, and as a result we’ve made a whole host of changes to the processor column of our main chart!
Ever since Intel won every race in the universe with the launch of Sandy Bridge back in 2011, they have been slacking. AMD’s tortoise needed six long years, but it overtook the sleeping Intel hare in 2017, leaving behind a lot of room for jokes at Intel’s expense.
But Intel, like all other large tech corporations, does have a solid engineering team tucked away. And the only thing that engineers need is time. Intel has been trailing AMD for four years, but that changed with the Alder Lake CPU launch a few nights ago.
RAM prices took to the skies in 2017, and remained airborne throughout 2018. This year, RAM prices have landed, settled down, and are considering digging an underground cave in preparation for Armageddon, and are expected to go down even further.
nVidia’s recent run has been amazing! The four RTX 20xx cards, followed by the GTX 1660 Ti and 1660 non-Ti, have all been winners. These cards have had great power consumption, great temperatures, and low noise levels. More importantly, nVidia gave you the ultimate reason to buy them: They beat the competition in terms of power. If new cards came out and performed worse than old cards… who would buy them? Right?
Your computer has faithfully been by your side for all these years. You can’t replace it (for whatever reason), but with Christmas coming up, you decide it’s time to give your little friend a much-deserved gift.
Or maybe it’s frustrating you with sluggishness. Either way, you’ve got a great excuse to give it a little performance boost. What I’m here to do is to help you figure out what you can do to upgrade your older system on a budget.
So, let’s discover how to upgrade an older PC.
This list is more suited to people who fit the following:
It is okay if the above doesn’t quite apply to you. This info can still be really helpful. Just keep in mind that you might have different upgrade options than listed.
I cannot claim that DDR3 was my first RAM-love; DDR2 has that honour. Or shame, if you prefer. But DDR3 has a special place in my heart, for it was the only RAM that was available when I built my PC. It was also the only RAM available when Orion and I built our office. For about a decade, it was the only RAM for normal users.
Recently, a user asked about RAM speeds and why we don’t recommend the fastest RAM possible, or the RAM with the lowest latency. After all, isn’t faster always better?
For all RAM, performance increases when speed increases and when latency decreases. However, the benefit from increasing speed far outweighs the performance loss of increasing latency. (For more information on this, read Crucial’s article on Speed vs. Latency.)