Should You Get a New Computer Or Even Upgrade

A question that we all have to ask ourselves
at some point, should I get... A new computer. Sometimes you ask yourself because your computer
doesn't seem to be able to handle all your games and programs as fast as it used to. And other times, you're just trying to convince
yourself that you need a new one so you can upgrade to the latest and greatest.

So clearly, there's a lot to consider when
thinking about this, and there isn't any straightforward answer. And if you're hoping that I'LL give you an
excuse to upgrade to a new computer you don't need... Well I might just do that I think the most important thing to do first
is divide up your reasons for upgrading into two catagories. What you want, and what you need.

AND YOU HAVE to be honest with yourself here. 99% Of the time when you hear someone say
"I need to do this" or "I need to get that", they don't actually need it, and hey, I'm
no exception to this. Also, you need to consider the specifics of
WHY you need a particular upgrade, whether it's one component, or the entire computer. Let's start off with cases where you would
NEED to upgrade your computer, because these are really easy.

Now, I'm not even talking about the obvious
case where your computer is broken or something, because that's a no brainer. Rather, it may be that your computer is unable
to do something that you consider really important. It doesn't have to be a matter of life and
death. For example, perhaps ALL your friends just
got a new video game, but your computer doesn't meet the minimum specs.

Sure, you don't NEED to play the game in the
sense that you won't die without it, but it would really suck to be the only one not able
to join in the fun. Or another example is if you're like me and
use your computer for work and it needs to be pretty powerful, in my case to render videos. So, the longer and higher the resolution the
video is, or the more effects I use, the more time it will take to render. If you have a low power computer, sure, you
COULD wait an entire day for a video to render, but what if it fails, or you realize you made
a mistake? That's another case where having a more powerful
computer can probably save you way more time and money in the long run.

And it doesn't have to be a job either, it
could be a hobby you spend a lot of time on. If you get to the point where your computer
makes it not necessarily IMPOSSIBLE, but IMPRACTICAL. To do something you either need or really
want to do, then I think it's totally justifiable to upgrade. Now what if you know your computer is fully
capable of doing everything you need, but there's still a little voice in your head
telling you that it's just not good enough? If you're like me, your brain might jump through
a lot of hoops to convince you that you that getting a shiny new machine will solve all
your problems! But we need to take a logical viewpoint here,
and not get ahead of ourselves.

First thing to consider, is what EXACTLY do
you want to get out of the new computer, or even an expensive new component? Do you want to be able to run your favorite
game on the next higher graphics setting? Do you want to get a higher framerate, or
higher resolution? Is there any other reason besides video game
performance? That last one is especially important, because
many times you don't necesssarily have to upgrade the whole computer, but just a component
or two. So let's say your computer runs completely
fine 99% of the time, but just can't run games as fast as you'd like. Honestly, it probably wouldn't make sense
to upgrade the whole computer just for game performance, unless it's REALLY old. You'd probably be able to get away with just
upgrading the graphics card.

Or maybe it is the case where the computer
overall is pretty slow and frustrating. I still wouldn't just jump right into a new
computer, because there are a few options you can take beforehand. I think the BIGGEST improvement you could
make is upgrading from a regular hard disk to a solid state drive, if you don't have
one already. People always seem to talk about getting more
RAM, but that doesn't always necessarily improve performance.

Getting an ssd WILL almost always improve
performance, because a mechanical harddrive is so slow compared to other components in
a computer, and often the bottleneck. Anything from copying files, to searching
through folders in explorer, or loading the map in a video game. Not only is this because SSDs have faster
read and write speeds in general, but also because you don't have to worry about fragmentation. In a hard drive, files are stored all over
the physical platters, which means if you have to access lots of little files at once,
the drive head has to physically move back and forth more to read them, which relatively,
takes LONG time.

With a solid state drive, there is no drive
head, so files can be accessed instantly no matter what. So seriously, try upgrading to an SSD before
you do anything. Now let's say you already have an SSD, but
the computer is still pretty slow. Unless it's slow during video games, upgrading
your graphics card probably won't help, so let's scratch that off.

That leaves two main components left, the
RAM and the CPU. Now this is tricky because a bottleneck in
either might manifest itself very similarly. If you don't have enough RAM or it's very
slow, it doesn't matter how fast your CPU. Is because the RAM can't queue up the data
to be processed fast enough.

And oppositely, if you have a slow CPU and
fast RAM, even though the RAM can queue up data to be processed quickly, the CPU can
only do it slowly anyway. Now I will say that 9 times out of 10, the
main bottleneck WILL be the CPU, especially if the computer is old. But the cases where RAM will be a big factor
is either if you just don't have nearly enough at all, or if you are running some seriously
heavy hitter programs, or just a ton of programs in the background at all times. That's because a program will only ever use
as much RAM as it needs to, most everyday programs really don't need much.

In my opinion, these days if you have less
than 8 gigabytes of RAM, then yea it might very well be causing a noticeable bottleneck
in your computer, and would be worth it to add more, even if you only run basic programs. I think 8 gigabytes is a reasonable minimum. Between 8 and 16 gigabytes will certainly
depend on what kinds of programs you're running. If you play video games, but don't really
run any other heavy duty programs like a video or photo editor, or you don't have many programs
running at once, you could probably justify going up to 12 gigabytes.

Above that though is probably overkill, and
I'd be surprised if you noticed any difference from 12 to 16. As for MORE than 16 gigabytes, well if you
need that much, you'd know it. Like I mentioned before, this would be for
people who do multimedia editing, use CAD. Software, deal with huge databases, virtual
machines, that sort of thing.

In those cases, the software will pretty much
use as much RAM as you can throw at it, especially when larger file sizes are involved. This is within reason of course, it's not
like I'd recommend ANYONE to go out and get 100 Gigabytes of RAM, if you could even install
that much in the first place. But for example, I have 32 gigabytes of DDR4
RAM, and for me that seems to be enough for me. Anyway, what I'd suggest is if you have 8
gigabytes of RAM or less, and you're willing to spend a bit on an extra 4 gigabytes, assuming
you aren't happy with your current performance.

Finally, one easy way you can check is to
use the built in "Resource Monitor" in windows, to see how much RAM is being used by each
program. Alright so enough about RAM, let's get to
the real brains of the computer. If you know that all your other components
are sufficient, then that just leaves the CPU. Doesn't matter how much RAM you have, how
fast your SSD, or how powerful your graphics card, a slow CPU will mean a slow computer.

Now if you know anything about building computers,
or maybe not even, you probably realize that upgrading ONLY your CPU really just don't
make sense. If your CPU is too slow, you may as well go
get a whole new computer. Though you could of course re-use some components
if you've upgraded them more recently, but I'm getting ahead of myself. If you're wondering why you can't just upgrade
your CPU, well there are a couple reasons.

First of all, CPU sockets on motherboards
change every few years as new CPUs come out. So chances are if you buy a brand new CPU
it wouldn't even fit into your current motherboard. Even if it did, your other components would
still be old, and then you'd have everything else causing bottlenecks. However, I do need to mention that if you
know what you're doing or you're willing to learn, instead of buying a whole new computer,
you might be able to overclock your current CPU.

Depending on the CPU itself, and your cooling
situation, you could definitely squeeze out some extra power. But that's beyond the scope of this video. Now as I mentioned before, your might still
be able to re-use some of your old components to save money, but you'd really only want
to do this if you had upgraded them recently enough where they're still decent. But obviously, you can really only do this
if you build your own PC, because you can't exactly buy a new computer off the shelf with
no RAM or hard drive.

So for example, if your computer is several
years old, but just last year you bought a brand new graphics card for it, well duh,
re-using that is a great way to save a ton of money. Or uou could cannibalize a fan or two if they're
good ones. And in some cases, you MIGHT even be able
to transfer your copy of Windows to the new machine, but not always, I'm not going to
get into that. However, you should also consider that many
times, pre-built PCs ARE actually cheaper than buying every piece of hardware individually.

So unless you know you want to build your
own, don't bother doing so just so you can re-use your CD drive or something like that
[Haha]. You could find that for the SAME price as
building a PC without a graphics card, you could buy a pre-built with an even better
one. Though I think most of you should already
have an idea of whether you'd want to build your own anyway. So let's tie this all together.

I hope I can assume that most of you can figure
out whether you NEED to get a new computer or upgrade. And if you just WANT to, it will come down
to how much you're willing to spend, and how big of a difference it will make. Individual components are usually an easier
decision, because they're obviously cheaper, and don't take as much work as setting up
a whole new computer. In my opinion, I tend to only upgrade my entire
computer when I NEED to.

Mostly because it's a huge pain to set everything
up again, plus it costs way more. I built my current computer in 2014, and I
think it still runs completely fine for my purposes. Though I have upgraded my graphics card since
then, and I've had my CPU overclocked from the beginning. So in my case, I definitely think I'll be
able to get at least another year out of this guy as long as nothing breaks.

Well, I think that's it, in the end you really
have to make the decision yourself, I just hope I am able to give you some things to
think about that might help. But anyway I'd love to know what you guys
think, like if you like to upgrade as often as you can, how come? Also if you want to keep watching, I'll put
some other videos right here, including some ways to speed up your computer without buying
anything. And if you want to subscribe, I make new videos
tuesday thursday saturday, should be worth it. So thanks for watching guys, I'll see you
next time, have a good one..