![]() AMD's Ryzen 7000 CPUs are still great buys too, too, but there's one tactical move here you can only make with 13th Gen Intel: pairing an i5-13600K (or one of the more affordable, lower power chips just announced at CES) with a motherboard that supports DDR4 RAM. If you haven't been paying attention to CPUs in recent years, this chart from PassMark helps illustrate how much generation-over-generation improvement there's been in recent years if your CPU is from 2017 or before, you've got some major gains laid out before you. This thing matches the 12th Gen Core i9 for single-threaded performance! Wild. We recently crowned Intel's new Core i5-13600K the best gaming CPU thanks to its six high frequency Performance Cores and more Efficient Cores than last year's model. Right now DDR5 is still an extra expense you could potentially avoid without missing out on much performance, though. It's an expensive proposition right when that new tech first comes out: DDR5 RAM was overpriced and nearly impossible to get ahold of a year ago, but it's now easy to find and not too much pricier than DDR4 (I'm guessing it'll take another year for prices to reach parity, though AMD's a bit more optimistic). Nothing excites us PC gamers like making the leap to a new generation of hardware, which I just advocated for in the SSD tip above. You have DDR4 RAM that can run at 3600MHz or higherīallpark price: $320 for CPU, $100 - $200 for motherboard.Upgrade: New Intel 13th Gen CPU & DDR4 motherboard You'll get maximum benefit from a new SSD on one of those platforms. ![]() It's not as flashy an upgrade for gaming as a new graphics card, but for day-to-day computing, nothing will improve your PC more.īonus value: AMD added Gen 4 SSD support with Ryzen 3000 (2019) and Intel added Gen 4 SSD support with 11th gen Rocket Lake (2021). But that's still way, way faster than SATA, and if you're on similarly old hardware, you'll absolutely be able to feel the difference in Windows and in game load times. My motherboard supported NVMe SSDs, but only at the Gen 3 speed of 4,000 MB/s max. When I bought mine, I was still using an Intel i7-7700K CPU from 2017. But forget all that: just focus on the fact that a high quality SSD like the Sky Hynix Platinum P41 can hit speeds of over 7,000 MB/s on a newer motherboard that supports PCIe Gen 4, or fully max out an older motherboard that supports PCIe Gen 3. Of course it's not as simple as "PCIe Gen 4 SSDs are 13 times faster"-that depends a ton on all kinds of factors, like whether you're reading or writing sequential or random bits of data, what kind of controller the SSD has, and on and on. The main takeaway here is that these newer, high-speed PCIe 4.0 drives support a faster data transfer rate that tops out at about 8,000 MB/s, vs. I realize there's a lot of technobabble in that first sentence, so if you don't really know what "PCIe Gen 4" means or understand the minutia of NVMe vs. This thing is so fast it brought my PC boot time to near single digits and made me feel a bit foolish for sticking with a SATA SSD all these years. It's the single best PC upgrade I've made in years. Over Black Friday I finally saw a price I was happy with for a 2TB PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSD and grabbed an SK Hynix Platinum P41, one of our top picks for the best gaming SSD. Your motherboard has an M.2 SSD slot that supports NVMe (likely on 2016 or newer).You're booting from a SATA SSD (or, gasp, HDD).(Image credit: Future) Upgrade: SATA SSD to PCIe Gen 4 SSD That means that if you're still sitting on an aging PC, a couple targeted upgrades could go a long, long way. The positive side to all this is that hardware has improved in leaps and bounds in recent years, after quite a few generations of unimpressive growth. And since then the $70 game has arrived on PC, too. The article we wrote in September 2021 about PC gaming becoming harder to get into still feels true. ![]() It's hard not to notice that PC gaming as a whole has gotten a lot more expensive in the last few years, thanks to a mix of powerful new tech and pandemic shortages that have driven component costs up and up. Today, if you want a graphics card at that entry level price right now, you basically have to buy… a GTX 1650. The GTX 1650, still the most-used card on the Steam hardware survey, launched for just $149 in 2019. Just a few years ago, a 2070 Super cost $499 a 1070 Ti cost $450. Later this year Nvidia will presumably roll out more affordable options. ![]() As of today, the cheapest new graphics card you can buy from Nvidia, the 4070 Ti, costs $799 before taxes.
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