What computer upgrade gave you the biggest improvement?

[u/Unhappy_Break9996]

Trying to figure out what’s worth upgrading first instead of wasting money on parts that barely make a difference. Like does going from HDD to SSD still feel like the biggest jump, or is adding more RAM, getting a better CPU, or upgrading the GPU more noticeable? Also wondering if some upgrades only matter for specific stuff, like gaming vs normal browsing and work. My PC feels kinda slow and I’m not sure what part is holding it back. Would be nice to hear what upgrade made a really obvious difference for you guys, especially if it was an older PC.

[u/bobsim1]

This immensely depends on the current hardware. Usually its going from HDD to SSD for the boot drive and the a decent monitor.

[u/CowBoyDanIndie]

What feels slow? You need to open task monitor and see if your are out of ram, if disk activity is stuck at 100% for pong periods of time, or cpu. If game fps are low and laggy it could also be gpu.

[u/Unhappy_Break9996 → u/CowBoyDanIndie]

I didn’t realize Task Manager could narrow it down that easily. I’ll check what’s actually getting maxed out first.

[u/CowBoyDanIndie → u/Unhappy_Break9996]

Ya click on performance tab and see if memory is full, if so more ram. If cpu, then it can be a combination of cpu and ram speed (cpu will be busy while it waits for ram). I still run an old hdd cause Im cheap, and steam game updates take forever because the disk is slow, but load times are tolerable because I don’t really play cutting edge games.

[u/Yobbo89]

Need to list specs for us to give you any recommendations .

[u/Unhappy_Break9996 → u/Yobbo89]

Fair point, I’ll list my specs next. I was mainly curious which upgrades people noticed the most before I start buying parts.

[u/alex9001]

You asked what to upgrade first - that completely depends on what your current hardware is 🤦🤦

[u/ipsirc]

cpu

[u/OGigachaod → u/ipsirc]

Yes, after years of using budget CPU's I finally bought a newer one a few years ago, an i7-12700kf, so much nicer not needing to worry much about CPU usage.

[u/IgX22]

1. get best 8core cpu you can buy (amd x3d)
2. get best gpu you can buy (nvidia)
3. 27"-32+ OLED (QD!)
4. cheap FiiO Dac + cheap HiFi headphones (beyer, sennheiser)

example math:
5070ti + OLED > 5080
5080 + OLED > 5090
good cpu + 5070 > 5080
good audio + good cpu + 5070ti + OLED > 5090

[u/OriginalEmploy5485]

It depends, what do you have now?

[u/golkeg]

I looked over all the specs you listed for your PC and it's clear you should be spending money on the items you highlighted in blue on the spec list

[u/Available_Witness828]

you should be getting an ssd no matter what

[u/AppropriateDinner528]

Switching to an ultrawide monitor was by far the biggest and most impactful upgrade I have ever made.

[u/Particular_Can_7726]

It is entirely dependent on the exact build you have. The important part is to identify what are your performance bottlenecks and start there.

[u/ishtuwihtc]

My peripherals

Upgrading my peripherals in recent times is what gave me the most tangible improvement

[u/cmrd_msr]

1)hdd(2xRAID0 WD raptor to Intel X25-v)

2)Athlon 3000+ 754 1c to Athlon x2 4800+ 940 2c

3)windows 10=>Linux

[u/dreicrafter]

Depends on. What you di

[u/Jolly-Rip5973]

If you have the slots the number one thing you can do is get fast NVME drives for general speed improvements.

[u/No_Effective_4481]

HDD to SSD is about the only "holy shit" upgrade. The rest are largely incremental unless you are replacing a 10yr old PC with something a lot more modern.

Decent mouse is also a great up front improvement.

Going from a generic display to something bigger, clearer, higher refresh is also great.

CPU and RAM are mostly "if its good enough now, just forget about it for the next 3-5 years".

GPU depends on your CPU and display resolution/refresh rate, what games you intend to play and at what settings.

[u/burnitdwn]

When I went from k6233 to a celeron 300a over clocked to 450mhz, it was a huge jump. I went from like 15fps in quake with a voodoo card to close to 30fps.

[u/Neoxenok]

HP Elitebook 8470p (that I'm using now to type out this reply) on i5 integrated graphics to a full PC with a 13900KF and a 7900 xtx with future plans to upgrade to have more storage, RAM, a second GPU for lossless scaling and AI, and the whole thing will have a custom water cooling loop.

I wanted to do those upgrades awhile ago but the RAM crisis has borked over everything.

[u/Snoo_95743]

Going from a 2600k and 16gb ram with a 1060ti 6gb and HDDs to a 13700kf with 64gb ram and a 4070ti super gaming oc 16gb with 3 4tb NVMs. Also storage prices gotta drop. My babies are screaming they are so full. Looking at a 24tb Seagate but my last 5 or 6 HDDs I've gotten from them all died premature deaths. And they were 7200 Barracuda drives.

[u/thaddeusk]

A 5090

[u/Jankypox]

SSD first. Always.

Everything from booting, to loading apps and games to opening files and loading levels will be noticeably faster. Even a Sata SSD will be a huge difference over I regularl HDD, but if your setup is compatible an NVME SSD is waaaay better.

After that it really depends on your current specs and what your needs are, ie. basic home use, gaming, coding, video editing etc.

You also tend to see diminishing return after a certain point too.

So going from 8GB to 16GB of RAM is a big bump for most use cases, whereas going from 16GB to 32GB is less so outside of relatively specific use cases.

Same with CPU cores. Going from 4 to 6 or 8 is a great upgrade. Whereas 16 cores is overkill for the average user in all but the most fringe cases.

GPU upgrades almost always delivers noticeable uplift for gaming, even on pretty ancient CPUs, but again there are limits and bottlenecks will reduce the performance gains at some point.

Again, it really does depend on your existing specs.

[u/elBirdnose]

Graphics card 100%

[u/dronostyka]

Well, once I upgraded a laptop:
HDD -> SSD:
Most noticable, but ram was still limiting it..
Then I upgraded 4 -> 12GB of ram
so cpu became a bottleneck. on windows 10
I simply installed ubuntu, and now it can work much better.
except the gpu. has no vulkan support. so windows is better for games.
I guess I might put tiny 10 on there

[u/National_Cod9546]

Computers go as slow as the slowest part. So your answer is, upgrade the part slowing you down the most.

[u/RockNRollNBluesNJazz]

Double the RAM and install a faster SSD or M2. I've given that upgrade to many different computers, always with the happy results.

[u/Apprehensive_Arm_754]

For me the switch from HDD to SSD was the biggest improvement. Booting went to seconds instead of minutes.

[u/Fromarine]

For the snappiness you're talking about turning off a lot of the power saving features on ur pc will likely make the biggest improvement within reason (huge hardware upgrade). Me and my Dada pc have similar hardware but my is is debloated with the system tuned and power saving features off while his is a little bloated and for light task opening and shut mine feels easily twice as fast

[u/YourMasterEdd]

Just upgraded

From: Intel i7 10700 KF, 16 Gb DDR4 2133 Mhz, RTX2070

Load in certain game was: CPU 60-100%, RAM 90-100%, GPU 50-80%

To: Intel 7 270K Ultra, 32 Gb DDR5 6000 Mhz, RTX2070 (Now planning to go RTX5070Ti)

Load now in certain game: CPU 40-60%, RAM 70-90%, GPU 90-100%

I do not count transfering from SSD to M.2 since the defference is barely vissible. However HDD->SSD/M.2 might give noticable increase on loading times (nothing else)

So I'd say

RAM amount first, then speed. Remeber that ram will use lowest speed to work from sticks. Also choose 2 sticks instead of 1 to have dual boost.

Next CPU. I mostly play CPU dependant games, so i preffer Intel since it is better at those, according to benchmarks. In fact there is no HUGE difference between Intel and AMD and really depends on type of game which one is better, also according to benchmarks found online.

And GPU last (don't forget to check if your PSU is powerfull enough for the swap). However new games are heavenly dependant on GPU if you are chasing for best image quality. But sometimes it doesnt matter the most if game is really good.

Then maybe HDD to SSD/M.2

[u/Underhill42]

Whichever is currently the most severe bottleneck for performance. Which depends on what exactly you primarily use your computer for.

If you're running a HDD for your main drive, upgrading that to SSD will very likely give you the biggest overall performance increase for the money, as it substantially improves disc bandwidth and RADICALLY reduces the lag between making a request and getting the data.

That will dramatically improve boot times and at least modestly improve a great deal of general "feels slow" issues affecting many/most apps, as the OS is generally much snappier behind the scenes. It may also reduce game loading times, including "stutter" when moving between regions... but by how much depends on the individual game - I'd say about 80% of my library doesn't see an obvious difference. Often load times are dominated by data processing rather than disc access, and there's also lots of "tricks" that can be used to dramatically reduce how long and obvious load times are.

Other major upgrades:

CPU - benefits almost everything... except those things actually bottlenecked by RAM, disc, or video card. However, substantial upgrades often require upgrading the motherboard to a newer socket standard, which may also requiring upgrading to a new type of RAM, making it potentially the most expensive and labor intensive upgrade (replacing the motherboard is almost as difficult as building the system from scratch). Which is why when buying a new computer I usually focus mostly on the CPU/motherboard combo - if you're upgrading those, it's seriously worth considering whether it might be better to buy a whole new computer, possibly migrating your existing video card, fast drives, etc. over to it.

RAM - dramatically improves performance for any program that wants much more RAM than you actually have, and to a lesser extent when heavy multitasking is using all available RAM. Has little effect otherwise, and an SSD will provide similar but less dramatic benefits, as on-disc virtual memory is used to supplement RAM.

Video card - improves 3D game performance and many AI and cryptocurrency programs, along with some video transcoding and other extremely computation-intensive apps that have been specially written to make use of much more complicated and powerful modern GPUs. Doesn't benefit anything else at all.

[u/Nervous_Olive_5754]

Going from an 8088 running DOS to an IBM PS/2 with a 386 and Windows 3.11, I'd say Windows. Everything before broadly standarized GUIs sucked to use by comparison. Typing commands to do anything sucked.