Most of us have become home-bound due to the ongoing global COVID-19 crisis. Everything has changed over the past few months, including the working pattern as most of the MNCs are asking employees to work from home. This has increased reliance on our old Desktop PCs which were once engulfed with dust from several years. While the dust can be easily removed, there’s a very good chance that you haven’t upgraded your home PC in years.
To solve this, we have compiled a few tips to improve Desktop PC performance either by doing some internal cleaning or upgrading hardware at minimal costs.
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After COVID-19, the unused electronics aka home desktops have emerged as real life-savers for gamers as well as the working population. However, some users are getting performance issues with Desktop PCs due to the old hardware or some other technical reasons.
There can be multiple reasons behind a sluggish PC. It can be a software glitch, a networking problem, or old hardware. You can troubleshoot the machine to find the root cause. But if it is related to hardware then we recommend you perform the below-mentioned steps to upgrade PC hardware at minimal costs.
Options to Upgrade Hardware on old Desktop PC
The user can change RAM, Storage device, Graphics Card, CPU, or even the whole motherboard if you have a feasible budget.
Note: Before upgrading any storage device, make sure to backup data. Also, check the compatibility of your hardware before making a purchase.
Upgrade to SSD
The best option to upgrade your old PC with 30-50% improvements in the desktop performance is by replacing the Hard-drive with a Solid State Drive (SSD). It will help the user to improve the boot-time, software opening time, and improve multitasking. If you haven’t used an SSD based PC before, know that the improvement in performance is significant.
The SATA SSDs can give speeds of up to 600MB/s, while the NVMe based SSDs offer speeds up to 3.2 GB/s. These speeds are at least 9X faster than the 7200 RPM Hard Drive.
There are multiple SSD available from Western Digital, Kingston, SanDisk, Samsung, Seagate, Crucial, Corsair, and others. These start from the nominal price of INR 2500 (~$33) for 240GB SSD.
You can look at different SSDs on Amazon
Upgrade RAM
Another major reason for the performance bottleneck on your PC could be the limited RAM. The machine can hang, or make programs stutter if there’s insufficient RAM. But you can easily upgrade the RAM either by adding another RAM stick or replacing the old one.
But before proceeding for the RAM upgrade, we suggest you check the desktop PC compatibility by knowing the hardware residing on the board. You can use tools like CPUz and others to get hardware information.
There are different type of RAMs that are available on the basis of compatibility:
- DDR1 – Mostly used on old PCs.
- DDR2 – A decade-old RAM type.
- DDR3 – Prominently used by most of the PCs built till 2017.
- DDR4 – Prevalent on most of the PCs these days offering better speed.
- DDR5 – New to the market with faster speed.
There are various RAM manufacturers like Kingston, HyperX, Corsair, Hynix, ADATA, and many others.
How to Find Compatible RAM Easily?
Almost every brand offers a vast type of RAMs for PCs, and we have concluded some best ways to find compatible RAMs Sticks for your desktop PC. Before you upgrade your RAM, you need to find compatible RAM sticks for your PC. There are a couple of options that offer this service, but we recommend the following:
- Kingston Memory Search: Users can easily search compatible RAM by using the Kingston Memory Search feature on its website. It will automatically search hardware present on your device and filters the compatible Memory sticks. You can easily choose between Kingston Value RAM (KVR) which is a standard RAM for all the OEM PCs and laptops. There’s another option of Kingston System Specific Memory (KSM) that gives maximum performance and is guaranteed to work with a specific system.
- Use CPUz to find hardware information: A 2 MB software can help you locate the compatible hardware for your desktop PC. After getting the hardware information, you can easily search for the RAM that fits in your motherboard.
It is highly advisable to check RAM compatibility before buying a new pair of RAM.
Nowadays, 8GB RAM is a basic configuration if you’re looking for basic tasks like browsing. There are a number of brands available but make sure to go for known names like Kingston or if you want something more powerful than even the HyperX series, depending upon your requirement. But as we mentioned above, if you are upgrading your PC in 2020, make sure to have at least 8GB of RAM. We actually recommend 16GB of RAM to ensure smooth performance.
Upgrade GPU
Graphics card has become a dire necessity on desktop PC even if you’re not a typical gamer. It aids better performance for work-based professional tools like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, and even handles Video Editing efficiently. The Graphics card mutually works with CPU by handling all the graphic tasks like display rendering, image handling, playing high-resolution videos, etc.
Like the RAM, and Storage drive, a compatible GPU is required to work effectively. We suggest you go through motherboard compatibility before buying a new GPU for your desktop PC.
Upgrade CPU
Upgrading your CPU will also significantly improve your PC performance. But it’ll be way more expensive than upgrading to an SSD or a larger RAM module.
But if it is feasible for you, you can definitely do that. However, we won’t recommend you to add a brand new CPU to your old motherboard. You can run into compatibility issues and if you are not careful, you might end up making an expensive and wrong purchase.
There’s another way out, you can buy a second-hand CPU which is more powerful and compatible with your current configuration. You can grab old CPUs from eBay, AliExpress, and many other online retailers.
Upgrade Whole PC (Motherboard + CPU + RAM + PSU)
It is well said that Sky is the limit and there are various new powerful options if you want to fully renovate your current PC hardware. Interested users can add a new motherboard, CPU, RAM, Storage, and PSU if you have the funds.
So these are some primary ways to eliminate the lag on desktop PCs. Users can opt for any of the above options to improve performance. Usually, upgrading to an SSD or a better RAM module should speed things up significantly. So make sure to consider these upgrades before deciding to go for a complete motherboard upgrade.
