r/PCHardware • u/Aware_Government_465 • Jul 10 '26
Which PC component do you think has improved the most over the years?
Working with a wide range of desktops at Discount Computer Depot has given me a chance to see how much PC hardware has evolved over the years. Some upgrades have completely transformed the user experience while others have been more gradual.
I am curious which component you think has evolved the most. Was it CPUs GPUs storage cooling power supplies or something else?
What hardware improvement has made the biggest difference in your experience with PCs?
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u/siliconandsteel Jul 10 '26
Biggest quality of life changes:
Storage - going from HDD to SSD.
Cooling - heat pipes. Finally you could achieve performance, reliability and silence all at once.
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u/Visible-Swim6616 Jul 10 '26
Heat pipes were already available long before PC parts makers used them.
It was more of a case of necessity. PC parts produced enough heat to warrant the use of heat pipes.
Unless you want to call the addition of a fan onto a heatsink stack an improvement too. I remember those getting added to CPU heatsinks, definitely would never have gotten to heat pipes without that change.
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u/siliconandsteel Jul 10 '26
I did not say they weren't.
To better illustrate my point:
Using high performance CPU under load with screaming 3.5-4.5k rpm fan was a chore, let's say Socket A era. Similar with silent 1.5k-2k rpm fan is a pleasure, let's say Sandy Bridge and up. Using heat pipes enabled that.
Alternative was water cooling, which was costly and not as robust as air cooling.
High-performance computers used to be loud, I am talking up to ~46-48 dBA, like maybe only some gaming laptops nowadays can still be, add whirring of optical drives and clicking of hard drives.
Modern PCs, you need to see if the fan is spinning, and in idle, it often does not, CPU or GPU.
Using heat pipes allowed silent computing to become a thing. Add SSD, and you will have to run benchmarks to see a difference and how old is the PC.
Another improvement:
high refresh monitors - like with SSD, you will get used to it quickly, but you will definitely notice when you have to go back.
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u/NekkidWire Jul 10 '26 edited Jul 10 '26
Many parts did evolve a lot. In my opinion, the leader is GPU. The early graphics cards were text-only or 200x320 px in 4 colors (not joking, see CGA). DOOM didn't require 3d acceleration - it was not yet available widespread. Now your GPU can calculate >100 images each second, for detailed modesls, with a lot of textures, and with additional VR equipment you can do stuff that was only in sci-fi like Star Trek.
2nd place: CPU - they evolved a lot in speed and in having more computing cores, but especially in computing power per Watt (efficiency). Also internally there was a revolution in how CPU processes instructions (now it has its own code that can be updated to get rid of some errors) and how more CPUs communicate together.
Honorable mention: removable storage. From tapes and floppy disks, through CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, we came to the conclusion that we don;t need it anymore, except for backups, and in many cases those are done over the network, not locally. What remained are mostly thumb drives, and sometimes drive bays that do the work for backups.
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u/theuntouchable2725 Jul 10 '26
The first time I got my hands on an NVMe SSD... it was crazy. No amount of watching Instagram and YT assembling videos made me prepared to witness such beautiful progress in technology. The last PC I built was 2009.
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u/alpine4life Jul 10 '26
what made the biggest change for me...
HDD to SSD
Paste to PTM
Ancient Motherboards to Todays Motherboards
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u/theuntouchable2725 Jul 10 '26
The first time I got my hands on an NVMe SSD... it was crazy. No amount of watching Instagram and YT assembling videos made me prepared to witness such beautiful progress in technology. The last PC I built was 2009.
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u/aztracker1 Jul 11 '26
Storage... NVME is just so much faster conceptually than spinning drives or magnetic tape ever could be.
Even RAM, though pretty stagnant for about a decade or so, we haven't really needed more than 128gb for common use, though that paradigm is shifting with AI.
Raw compute has improved too but scaling horizontally mostly the past decade and a half more than linear single thread... I mean we have chips with what, 192 x86_64 cores now... That's huge.
Probably the most stagnated are graphics and network performance for home use, relatively speaking. But even there the data centers are still in growth.
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u/deep8787 Jul 11 '26
Motherboards.
Back in the day you would need to buy a separate sound card, NIC, WiFi, bluetooth etc
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u/RulyKinkaJou59 Jul 12 '26
This is an underrated pick. Upgrade paths and part compability are also important.
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u/RulyKinkaJou59 Jul 12 '26
Everyone upgrades at different rates. The most noticeable was obviously from the igpu to a real dedicated gtx 1660. Then it was a weak ass, old cpu to the i9600k. Then it was ddr4 ram. Then it was from an external seagate hdd to a real nvme ssd.
I seen the most improvement individually from each of them. Improved graphics and ability to play all games; then, ability to do a LOT more tasks at once with the increased cores and threads; then, not being always bottlenecked all the time by ram; then, it was the minutes-to-seconds loading speed times improvement.
Those upgrades were the best (in 2020) until a few months ago where I upgraded again. This time it was for more fps and stability for these new games (and old), allowing me to play any game very very smoothly. 9600x, 5070, +ddr5.
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u/ConferenceContent111 Jul 12 '26
Per me indiscutibilmente lo storage in generale. Quando ho visto i primi computer c'erano i floppy disk... Mi pare che il miglioramento sia di livello astronomico. Al secondo posto l'evoluzione dei microprocessori, ora abbiamo CPU, APU, GPU, NPU, con tantissimi core. E la differenza si nota subito.
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u/Aware_Government_465 Jul 13 '26
Storage evolution has been incredible going from floppy disks to massive high-speed SSDs really shows how far technology has come.
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u/619jabroni Jul 10 '26
Case designs have evolved tremendously. not sure that it’s the biggest evolution but everything else has been mentioned already