This should be easy.. EVERYTHING available these days should be better than 10 year old kit right?
I built my computer in 2011 using the best components my money could buy, it was a pretty good machine and I’ve used it every day since for work with light gaming on timeless classics such as Starcraft and Return to Monkey Island. The pc never missed a beat and never felt sluggish, especially since it got an ssd boot drive upgrade, however as I’m looking to use media to connect to my customers it got me wondering, is it time to upgrade?
The Starting Point
- CPU: Intel Core i5-2500K 3.3 GHz Quad-Core Processor
- CPU Cooler: Intel E97379-001 CPU Cooler
- Motherboard: ASRock H61M-VS Micro ATX LGA1155
- Memory: Kingston HyperX Fury Blue 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR3-1600 CL10 Memory
- Video Card: VisionTek Radeon HD 5450 2 GB Video Card
- Storage: Mushkin Chronos Deluxe 240 GB 2.5″ Solid State Drive
- Storage: Seagate Barracuda 750 GB 3.5″ 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive
- Optical Drive: Lite-On ihes112-04 Blu-Ray Reader, DVD/CD Writer
- Plenty of dust and a birds nest of wires in a generic case.
- Screen: Dual Bush 24″ LCD TVs
The problem with upgrading my setup however is there’s very little I can do which would will be cost effective..
- CPU: Keeping the motherboard, the best processor I can get would be something like the i7 3770k, this currently retails at between 200-300GBP which is a lot for very little gain over the 2500k
- MEMORY: The motherboard can take a maximum of 16gb so without getting another motherboard there’s not a lot to do.
- GRAPHICS: This is where the system could be improved however the graphics card market is in chaos with most cards being out of stock or sold at inflated prices its easier to say pop in a new graphics card than it is to do.
Time to Upgrade
So with my options limited to spending a lot for very little gains I resorted to the free upgrades, giving the PC some much needed TLC, stripping it down, giving it a good clean and reapplying thermal paste to the processor. I also purchased a second hand Gainward Geforce 1050ti 4gb which is far from the latest and best but according to Userbench.com its over 3000% better than the 5450 I’ve been using for the last 10 years.
And I guess that’s all I can do for now.
If this was a purely gaming machine, given the i5 2500k processor has great single core speeds I think now I have a half decent graphics card, it’s a pretty good machine, specially when I have no plans to run games like Cyberpunk at ultra settings, however with the plan to run multiple cameras and screen capturing at the same time, I may need to consider building a new PC, and I’ll be honest, I forgot how much I enjoy building computers, stripping this one down and rebuilding it may have ignited a fuse that can’t be stubbed out.
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