Upgrading Your PC

Introduction

You've had your custom PC or a notebook for a while now and
you would like to upgrade it somehow, perhaps to make it faster or replace
parts that are starting to fail. Question is, how do you do that? Where do you
start? Are upgrades available for your system and how much are you prepared to
spend?

The purpose of this guide is to give you an idea what's all
involved into upgrading certain components and how you can find out the best
upgrade path for you. Notebooks and laptops are generally much tougher to
upgrade. However, we will point out those parts in the guide that also pertain
to notebook upgrades. The main body of this guide will be composed of the major
internal components and their upgrade stages.

Computer Case

If you simply want to change the look of your PC, you can
just replace the case. As long as the replacement you're looking for has just
as much room or more, then you can perform the swap easily. You can't downsize
the case if the components won't allow it. For example, if you have an ATX
motherboard, you can't go down to a case that will only allow mini ATX board.
Cases have evolved in a way they look, but not in the way they function. ATX
format has been running pretty strong for years now and is most likely going to
stay here in the near future.

Power Supply

Just like the cases, standard for power supplies has not
changed. They have gotten better, more powerful and include more rails, but
overall the design is the same and thus you can purchase any new power supply
with more power (wattage) and install it without any problems.

Hard drives

There have been some new connection standards that have
recently hit the market, such as PCI express drives, miniSATA drives and so on.
We won't go into details on those, but the most basic desktop drives as we know
them, both in 3.5” sizes and 2.5” sizes haven't really changed. Both SSDs and
Mechanical drives still utilize the same power and data connectors and are
backwards compatible with older storage controllers (SATA 1 and SATA 2). If you
need to upgrade a HDD, you should be able to do so easily and all you have to
worry about is the size. Notebook users are limited to 2.5” drives while
desktop users can choose either one.

Optical Drives

Again, no real change here either. They utilize same power
and data connectors like the hard drives and have not changed much over the
years. If you would like to upgrade your optical drive to a blu-ray player, it's
a simple plug & play process.

Video card

Most video cards on the market are PCI express based and are
backwards compatible with old PCI express slots. As long as your motherboard
has a PCI express slot you should be able to add any card, provided there's
enough power from the power supply. The PCI express slot should be primary and
be PCIe x16 in order for the card to work properly. Larger gamer cards also
require additional power supply connectors. 6pin, 8 pin, combination of both is
sometimes required to provide enough power to the card. Before you purchase a
video card upgrade, verify the card power requirements and your existing power
supply connectors. Avoid using molex adapters as that's not an ideal way to
connect your card to the power supply. You should always use native PCIe power
lines.

Motherboard, CPU and
RAM

We've grouped these parts together as they can be difficult
to upgrade on their own depending on the lifetime of each product and the fast
evolving technology. These 3 components (RAM not as much but included anyway)
are the fastest changing of them all. The problem with this is, it makes it
really difficult to obtain upgrades within the same technology line 3-4 years
down the road. For example, if you bought a 1366 Socket motherboard 4 years ago
and want to upgrade it or simply change it because yours failed, you'll have a
really difficult time because this socket has been phased out and no one sells
boards anymore. The only ones you can find are used and/or refurbished. Even if
the parts are available, sometimes outdated technology can cost more than the
current. For example, just before the 1366 boards were completely phased out,
their prices jumped so high that some of them were actually more expensive than
the successor socket boards, socket 2011.

What this means is that, it's usually best to upgrade these
components as a group. In other words, motherboard and CPU are always going to
follow each other. Therefore, if you want to upgrade your CPU, you should be
upgrading the motherboard also, as it will most likely be required to make the
switch.

Memory is usually transferrable as long as the DDR type is
the same. For example, if you have older DDR3 RAM, despite running slower
frequency than today, it is still compatible with most new motherboards, so it
can be re-used. However, as we begin to approach DDR4 RAM, more boards will
begin to support this and will most likely not accept DDR3.

Conclusion

Most components can be upgraded, some are fairly simple to
do others require to be changed with multiple items, but the upgrade possibilities
are certainly there. Depending on your budget and your goals, it should be
relatively easy to find the upgrade parts.