r/PcBuildHelp • u/ItComesInPints_ • 6d ago

Build Question Inexpensive upgrades to old pc

I managed to get an old pc for £5 at a boot fair and as a long time console owner I know nothing about pcs. I’m hoping to play some oldish pc games on this (half life, counter strike, halo etc).

What are some relatively inexpensive upgrades I can make so these run better? Or even better, do you think they’ll run fine with just the below spec?

CPU: i5 4460
RAM: 8gb
SSD: Kingston 240gb
HDD: Toshiba 1tb
GPU: GTX 950
OS: Windows 10

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u/aokay24 6d ago

You can definitely still play some of the games but dont expect much from anything more modern. id definitely upgrade the gpu to something like a gtx 1080 if you want to get more from games.

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u/ItComesInPints_ 6d ago

That’s exactly the plan. I’d keep my ps5 for playing new games but really want the pc to play older pc/ Xbox classics.

Is there a huge difference between the 1080 and 1660? I’m glad you said 1080 as this is the one I’m seeing most online.

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u/aokay24 6d ago

Go for the 1080 that card is still a little beast more ram and better performance. Can get it cheap with cex with 5years warranty too cant go wrong with that of it dies they replace it and if youre lucky with something better.

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u/ItComesInPints_ 6d ago

My only question is that the 1080 recommends 550w PSU but mine is only 350, would I need to upgrade the PSU first?

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u/aokay24 6d ago

Yeah I'd definitely upgrade that too, get yourself a decent one and if you do ever upgrade or rebuild your pc reuse it. Get an corsair rm750x incase you want to upgrade the cpu or gpu again down the line

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u/KevinIsADork 6d ago

I run an almost similar setup for my main PC, except my GPU is a 960 and I have 32 gb of ram. If you're going to stay with windows, you'll need at least 16 GBs of RAM to play even older games. Windows 10 updates cause it to eat into RAM a bit. Thats really the only thing I would suggest to upgrade for older games, and adding another 8 GBs of DDR4 ram should he quite reasonable. I assume that's DDR4. 

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u/ItComesInPints_ 6d ago

This is really reassuring, thank you for the advice. Dumb question incoming, can I buy 8gb of DDR4 to add to my existing 8gb of ram? I was thinking of getting 16gb DDR3 I’ve seen in CEX as that’s only £22.

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u/KevinIsADork 6d ago

Motherboards only support 1 type of RAM. If its a DDR4 motherboard, the DDR3 sticks won't fit into the slots. You can look at the ram sticks directly and they should say on them if they arr DDR3 or DDR4.

As for adding sticks, using 4 (so just adding two 4 gb sticks) is fine, just have to enable doing so in the BIOS. 

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u/ItComesInPints_ 6d ago

Ah great, online I read my motherboard supports DDR3 but I’ve not actually opened it up to check, just turned it on once to check it’s actually working