Today's Best Tech Upgrades

What hardware to upgrade in your ageing machine, and when.

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THE CONCEPT OF THE UPGRADE PATH is at the very core of the hardware enthusiast’s philosophy. The notion that you can take a five-year-old system, throw out a few parts, install a few new ones, and have a rig up and running—which almost competes with a brand new build—in less time than it takes for Obama to drop the mic is certainly appealing. But how far does it go in practice? What makes the biggest difference? And what should you upgrade first?

This month, we decided to find out. We took two case studies, two rigs gathering dust in the corners of our office: one a gaming system, the other a workstation. And then we chose two very different upgrade paths for them both, just to see what makes the biggest difference to overall performance in their respective fields.

The first system was an ageing workstation. Featuring a mighty Core i7-970, this bad boy was Intel’s second venture into six-core processors—and coming in at 3.2GHz and $885, it was no slouch. Coupled with a thwomping 6GB of DDR3 1600, a singular 2TB SATA II HDD, and a powerful ATI HIS HD 5870 graphics card, it was a monster in its heyday. Six years on, however, its hard drive is sluggish, the processor on a par with a modern Core i5, and its motherboard support simply laughable. In the other corner is our gaming rig. Far younger than its sibling workstation, this one had fared a bit better over the years. Featuring an Intel Core i5-4670, the Haswell monster still had plenty of computational power to muster—with 8GB of RAM, a 256GB OCZ Vertex 4 SSD, and a reference GTX 670 pumping those frames, you could still game at 1080p, albeit far below the minimum 30fps in most cases.

So, if you’re curious about what you should upgrade next, and whether it’s worth it, or you just want to take a look at what we did to bring these mature machines back to life, read on.