Things to consider when wanting to upgrade

As time passes, your system may lose some of its original appeal and you'll find yourself considering if it's time to upgrade. The tasks you're throwing at it appear to be giving the PC a harder time than it used to, or it's taking longer to do things. Maybe you're running out of storage space. Upgrading a PC can restore the PC to an improved & modernised version of "as good as new" without upsetting your bank account. But, shovelling money into an old PC isn't always the way to go either, so you'll want to consider whether it's better to upgrade, or switch to a completely new system (and sell off or donate the old one as a complete working unit). This page is here to help you figure that out!

Day to day tasks

Whether you're gaming, editing photos/videos, or performing intensive data crunching, your PC is the tool enabling you to get the job done. Likely when you first got your PC all of this seemed quick and you were getting much higher graphics fidelity, or churning through workloads in a fraction of the time compared to the old PC - and everything was awesome! If you're not still feeling that way (granted it's been at least a few months) we can look at refreshing things to bump the performance and your output capabilities once again.

What component is the bottleneck

When it comes to performance issues, we often refer to the component that's causing it as the bottleneck. Some of you may know which component is causing the slowdowns impacting your workload, but if you're not sure an easy way to get to the bottom of it is by opening up Task Manager and switch over to the Performance tab while you're running through your tasks [example image below]. Whichever of the graphs are getting near 100% is typically the offender causing your bottleneck.

Just be sure you run through a few different tasks so that you're not falsely believing that you only have one bottleneck in your system! It could be quite possible that in Photoshop for instance the bottleneck is RAM, while in gaming it's your GPU - as an example.

As you can see, starting Photoshop & Lightroom at the same time makes my CPU a little unhappy (expected though)

Which component to upgrade?

CPU

If you spoke to our staff before purchasing about future upgrading in particular, it's quite likely that we would have told you to spend a little more on the CPU if you had spare budget to spend at the time. By doing this, we limit the possibility that you would want to upgrade just the CPU, so unless you spent far too little at the initial time of purchase, the CPU alone shouldn't be worth upgrading while it's still possible to buy same generation CPUs brand new (enabling a simple slot in), and instead it often is more worthwhile to do motherboard + CPU at the same time... more on that below!

In general, our stance on upgrading from one CPU to another within the same generation is that it's not the best economical choice and should be avoided if at all possible.

RAM (Memory) and/or storage drives (HDD + SSD)

These items will come down to how you use your PC more than strictly meeting hardware requirements suggested by software/game publishers, so it's a bit more personal and can change as you take on new workloads. RAM & storage are generally items that can easily be upgraded (increased by adding in or swapping over) without having an adverse result on the other components or creating a new bottleneck.

GPU

If it has been a few years since your GPU was purchased, there's a very good chance there's a new generation of graphics cards which will mean upgrading and unlocking more GPU processing power is possible.

As a pretty loose rule, if for instance you've got an RTX 2070, you can expect roughly similar performance from the replacement generation's RTX 3060. Extrapolating on that rule, we'd expect the RTX 4050 (if it ever exists even) to roughly match that of an RTX 2070 - but it's always a good idea to check reviews and benchmarks just to be sure. This is all just to say: make sure that your intended upgrade is actually an upgrade!

You will also need to also consider the if the PSU (power supply unit) will be able to cope with the new GPU's power demands in conjunction with the rest of the system.

Motherboard + CPU

If it's been a few years, it's quite likely that you'll need to upgrade your motherboard in order to support a latest generation CPU. There may be some exceptions, such as what we just witnessed from AMD's Ryzen platform where those with 1000 series (1st gen) CPUs should have been able to upgrade to a 5000 series (4th gen) CPU without necessarily changing their motherboard (with the right motherboard model and BIOS update) albeit with some features limited due to technological reasons. Usually, our safe general advice is to skip a generation and consider the one after, just to ensure you're getting a large improvement in performance to make it worthwhile. Or, if you're sitting on an Intel i5 or AMD R5 CPU from one or two generations back and want much more power, you could achieve that by jumping to an i7/R7 or i9/R9 of the latest generation.

You will also need to also consider the if the PSU (power supply unit) will be able to cope with the new GPU's power demands in conjunction with the rest of the system.

We can help!

If you've considered all the above and are ready to talk upgrades or new system (or if you need some quick help on which of those two options you should go ahead with) we're more than happy to help out. Get in touch, ensuring you provide us with your Evatech order info (order reference or invoice number) so we can check all your build info, or if the build wasn't done by us then provide us with the full parts list so we know what we're advising on.

Ultra importantly: let us know what your budget is for the ugprade! Money is going to play a huge part in what can/can't be achieved, so please don't leave this detail out when contacting us.