Hello out there to the people (or person, as it’s more likely to be) reading this entry, first off an advance apology to those not really into the “technical” side of computing or computing in general… This post is going to (at least in the first instance) be a post to do with computing.
But for those of you intrigued none the less but don’t deem yourself computer “savvy”, don’t worry I will attempt to make this post accessible to all, but if you do wind up thinking “What the…?” leave a comment and I’ll try and clarify things…
So you bought/built a computer 4 or 5 years ago, as with a lot of electronics, it seems to be experiencing signs of “ageing” and doesn’t seem as effective as it once was (yes believe it or not electronics can have the same traits as humans, without the hair loss or girlfriend problems lol)…
What do you do when this comes around? Is there a cheap way to bring a new burst of life into your PC which has served you well over the past years? Well it’s come to the point where I am posed to asked myself the same questions…
You see, I woke up this morning after finding out last night that my PC system’s motherboard (technobabel translation: The motherboard is like the capillary and vain system in a human body, it is what acts as the transport system for all the information your computer needs.) may be on it’s last legs, as it seems to be having problems routing power properly to all it’s internal components…
This prompted me to backup things fairly promptly, even if chances are it will remain functioning for quite a while, touch wood *touches wood*, I thought it’s better safe than sorry. Then this morning out of pure curiosity I started looking at the costs involved with upgrading my PC in an aim to resurrect a bit of life into it…
The biggest problem I face though is one of the most expensive components in my current PC is the graphics card (technobabel translation: the piece of hardware that outputs the image to your monitor) uses an old interface method that has been phased out in the last year and a bit (technobabel translation: a computer interface is the method used to connect a component to the motherboard).
The interface in question is the formally very popular AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) which has now effectively been replaced by a PCI-E (PCI Express) implementation for graphics cards… What this pretty much means is, should I want to upgrade my motherboard to support newer and better features that are now commonly used (Like PCI Express, SATA II and Higher Speed RAM..) I would be forced to buy a new graphics card that uses this new interface…
Why? simply because at the beginning of 2007 the companies that make the motherboards have made the decision to concentrate on releasing newer motherboards supporting solely PCI-E. One option of course is to buy a cheap PCI-E graphics card and wait for the time I can afford a card with slightly more power, but it would still give me a spare graphics card that when purchased cost a fair amount of money…
So the first piece of hardware is considered… what next? Well I’ve actually already mentioned it previously, it’s the motherboard of the PC, fundamentally, this is the piece of kit that needs to be replaced, however, it seems silly to spend £80+ on a new motherboard that has no “expandability”. If you want to keep your upgrade path open for at least a couple years the motherboard is the hardware that needs to be up to the very latest standards, which is a task within itself as new technologies are constantly being released.
An up to date, and technologically “in-tune” motherboard that has suffice connectivity to meet my requirements (technobabel translation: when I say connectivity I refer to things like the number of USB “sockets” e.g. where you plug in an iPod / MP3 player, the number of interfaces on the motherboard to plug extra add-on hardware into etc.) costs anywhere between £90-£200 (depending on your requirements).
So that’s another £100-£200 on top of the cost of the graphics card, and we’ve not even considered the CPU (technobabel translation: the CPU is the “brain” of the computer, it basically does all the thinking and is a huge factor in determining how quick your computer runs). A mid-range CPU costs in the regions of £80-£140… So the costs are quickly mounting up here…
The final hardware that needs to be upgraded to give that life back to my current PC (as the rest of my current components could be reused in the time being) is the RAM (Random Access Memory) (technobabel translation: RAM is like the short term “memory” of a computer, it’s a place where your PC stores it’s temporary thoughts / paperwork, for a computer it’s quicker to get commonly used information from RAM than from your Hard drive (where data is permently stored)).
Today’s recommended RAM amounts is either 2GB (technobabel translation: GB = GigaBytes) for normal non-power users or 4GB or more for people who do graphic work or play games, the latter meets my requirements, so I would be looking at around £100 for 4GB of decent memory…
So I would be looking at around £400+ to bring life into my now aging computer, and that’s just because of the need to change the motherboard to allow for future expansion…
So is the cheap PC upgrade path dead for someone who hasn’t already hitched onto the PCI-E bandwagon? I think it’s faily safe to say yes, nowdays it’s actually a lot cheaper to start from scratch whilst maybe “borrowing” some parts from the old PC, e.g. your hard drives and disc drives. Unfortunately though it’s a fact of life that technology continues to move on, so even if you do get a top of the line PC you may find a need to burst life into that PC 3 years down the line…
So fundamentally, when looking to build yourself a new PC, be realistic and think what you actually need from your PC, don’t go for top of the line components for the sake of it, go for components to match your requirements, and then when it comes to needing to upgrade you haven’t paid over the odds for something you hardly used the potential of…
Post Tagged With: AGP, costs, CPU, hardware, Information Technology, motherboard, PC, PCI-E, RAM, SATA II, technology, upgrade.
April 23rd, 2008 at 10:58 am
This is a problem all us tech savvy people face. Your right, you are better off starting off from scratch. Get yourself a nice quad core, and motherboard with dual or tripple SLI for ‘future proofing’. Maybe a mid range Crysis ready Nvidia 8800. Good luck mate
April 23rd, 2008 at 5:49 pm
aaah you’re obviously too young to remember the shift to ddr/agp. ;)
if you wanted to go the economy route you can get some pretty decent economy choices (eg asrock boards, low-end amd dual-cores), then that can be a platform to continue your cheap upgrade path.
imho you only need the 4gb if you go with vista, which to be honest i wouldn’t recommend for graphics/gaming anyway so you should only need the 2gb either way. :)
April 24th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
Computers are a luxury item. They exist to soak up all that expendable income. If you could just get away with spending £200 every 3 years to update it, would they really be fulfilling their mandate? Of course not.
January 3rd, 2010 at 10:06 pm
My brother in law would be amazed this website. We were not too long ago discussing about this. lol