Computer Upgrade: the Ideal Way to Keep Up Without Breaking the Bank

I’ve been an avid gamer since I was very young. I was like 5 or 6 years old when my uncle introduced me to my first RTS game – Starcraft. To be honest, most of the time I had no idea what I was doing and used cheat codes to beat my way through the campaign and the AI I played against. However, as time passed by, that became less and less fun because I always knew the end outcome of the game – me winning.

I started avoiding using cheats and starting using my brain to develop strategies and think of ways to beat the AI. At first, I was rarely winning and it was really frustrating, but eventually I learned how to properly play the game and almost always won, unless I messed up something. My point is, gaming really grew on me and grew me as a person, so I kept it as my hobby.

A couple of years ago, when Starcraft 2 came out, I remember trying to install it and play it on my old PC which had like 512 GB RAM on the graphics card, a 2.4 GHz Intel Core processor, and 1GB of DDR2 RAM. Frankly, I hadn’t upgraded it until then mainly because the games I played – Starcraft and Warcraft III – weren’t really demanding. But Starcraft 2 turned out to be a whole different story, and after seeing that my PC couldn’t really handle it, the worst case scenario went through my head – I’ll have to spend a fortune to get a new gaming setup.

So I called a friend who was dealing with computer repairs and knew more about computers than me, and he told me that it really wasn’t necessary to spend like $1000 on a brand new computer. All I needed was to just buy a better graphics card (that costs about $100), let him do some maintenance work on the computer, remove any malware, and install the right drivers in order for the new game to run smoothly.

And that’s all it really took – I upgraded from the ancient GeForce 9500 GTX, to a GeForce GTX 430, which was fully optimized for Starcraft 2 yet wasn’t a high-end expensive graphics card, I added more RAM (which is relatively cheap), and I formatted the drives. All of the computer repairs and the small hardware upgrades cost me a few hundred bucks, saving me about $500 in the process.

I guess what I’m really trying to say is, don’t always jump ship as soon as your computer doesn’t go as fast as you’d like it to. It probably has the potential to run better than you think without having to change the entire setup. All you have to do is clear it from malware, change one or two parts and you should be able to play your games with ease. And with the speed at which new graphics cards are being released, on today’s market you can easily grab a 2 GB Nvidia in the 9xx series for about $150, which will be good enough to run even the latest and most demanding of games like Overwatch, Battlefield 4, Far Cry, Crisis, etc.