I genuinely dont understand this. On time my friend bought an rtx 3060 (was using rx580).
I asked “oh cool, whay new games are you gonna play?”. She said “none, I’m just gonna play the same ones”. I asked “what was wrong with the old card?” And she said “idk just felt like I need a new one.” We play games like tf2…
I just don’t get this type of behaviour. She also has like 14 pairs of sneakers.
i just upgraded this year, to an r9 5900x, from my old r5 2600, still running a 1070 though.
I do video editing and more generally CPU intensive stuff on the side, as well as a lot of multitasking, so it’s worth the money, in the long run at least.
I also mostly play minecraft, and factorio, so.
ryzen 5000 is a great upgrade path for those who don’t want to buy into am5 yet. Very affordable. 7000 is not worth the money, unless you get a good deal, same for 9000, though you could justify it with a new motherboard and ram.
I’m rocking a 5800X and see no reason to go to 7000 or no 9000 anytime soon. It’s been great since I built the PC.
My PC was made in 2014 and i upgraded it but it died in 2022 due to mishandling. If you keep your PC clean and don’t move it it can last even longer!
I’m the one person who people go to for PC part advice, but I actually try to talk them down. Like, do you need more RAM because your experience is negatively impacted by not having enough, or do you just think you should have more just because?
Ha, I had this exact conversation with a friend of mine a few days ago, he wants to upgrade from 16GB to 32GB and when I asked why, he just blanked out for a while and went “…because more is better, right?”
He spends most of his time playing rpg maker porn games and raid shadow legend, also really taxing that RTX 3070 he bought right in the middle of the pandemic.
I showed this to my penultimate daughter, who coopted my (literal 2014) Dell PC, the only thing I’d ever done to it was add memory, it is a beast still. Said “look, your 4chan twin” and she cracked up. But if she does not steal it when she moves out I will probably be able to get ten more years out of it.
I built a PC in 2011 with an AMD Phenom II. Can’t remember which one, it may have been a 740. And I’m pretty sure a Radeon HD 5450 until FO4 came out in 2015 and I needed a new graphics card. Upgraded to a Radeon R7 240, and some other AM3 socketed CPU I found for like, $40 on eBay. By no means was I high end gaming over here. And it stayed that way until 2020, when I finally gutted the whole thing and started over. It ran everything I wanted to play. So I got like, 9 years out of about $600 in parts. That’s including disc drives, power supply, case, and RAM. And I’m still using the case. I got my money’s worth out of it, for sure. The whole time we were in our apartment, it was hooked up to our dumb TV. So, it was our only source of Netflix, YouTube, DVDs, and Blu-rays. It was running all the time. Then, I gave all the innards to my buddy to make his dad a PC for web browsing. It could still be going in some form, as far as I know.
I remember the 5450! I got one when wrath of the lich king dropped because my Dell integrated graphics couldn’t handle strand of the ancients. That baby got me from 2 FPS to 15. Served me until I left for school.
I barely remember it, which is think is a compliment because it just worked! Never had any driver issues or temperature problems, didn’t demand too much power. It just did its job until I needed something more.
I originally built my current PC back in 2016 and only just “upgraded” it last year. I put upgrade in quotes because it was literally a free motherboard and GPU my buddy no longer needed. I went from a Core i5 6600K to a Ryzen 5 5500GT and a GTX960 4GB to a GTX1070. Still plays all the games I want it to, so I have no desire to upgrade it further right now. I think part of it is I’m still using 1080P 60Hz monitors.
I was running one from 2011 up until 2 years ago when I finally hit a wall in a game I was trying to play and had to upgrade the processor (which meant a new motherboard, which meant new everything). Prior to that I had only upgraded the GPU a couple years prior which i really didn’t need but it was a present to myself and I was able to give the old one to my brother. By the time this one is outdated I might not even be interested in computers anymore with the way things are going with technology.
I’m still using the i7 I built up back in 2017 or so… Upgraded to SSD some years ago, will be upping the ram to 64gigs (max the mb can handle) in a few days when it arrives…
I thought anon was the normie? The average person doesnt upgrade their PC every two years. The average person buys a PC and replaced it when nothing works anymore. Anon is the normie, they are the enthusiasts. Anon is not hanging with a group of people with matching ideologies.
Let’s just drop the word “normie” altogether.
The word is incredibly vague and fails to reflect the diversity of viewpoints and opinions. Everyone has their own perception of what is most common, so the definition varies wildly.
The word is incredibly vague
isnt that, the point?
It’s supposed to refer to “normal” people. an incredibly broad and vague selection of people, who are, rather indistinct.
Kind of, but in doing so it loses any significant meaning. Everyone interprets it as they see fit
These are PC gamers, their hobby revolves around computers.
It’s similar to how car enthusiasts might give you shit for driving a ten year old Camry, whereas most people won’t care.
Yeah, most people. Aka the “normies”.
Normies still have hobbies
The point that the thread OP is trying to make that a “normie” is someone who is not considered as passionate about a subject as, say, an enthusiast. So naturally, they will not be as prone to spend money and replace their gear very often.
if you had a top of the line pc in 2014 you’d be talking about a 290x/970/980 which would probably work really well for most games now. For CPU that’d be like a 4th gen intel or AMD Bulldozer which despite its terrible reputation probably runs better nowadays thanks to better multi-threading.
A lot of the trending tech inflating minimum requirements nowadays are stuff like raytracing (99% of games don’t even need it) and higher FPS/resolution monitors that aren’t that relevant if you’re still pushing 1080p/60. Let’s not even begin with Windows playing forced obsolescence every few years.
Hell, most games that push the envelope of minimum specs like Indiana Jones are IMO just unoptimised messes built on UE5 than legitimately out of scope of hardware from the last decade. Stuff like Ninite hasn’t delivered in enabling photorealistic asset optimisation but HAS enabled studios to cut back on artist labour in favour of throwing money at marketing.
You have to try really hard to even notice Ray tracing in a lot of games. Well except for your fps halving, that’s pretty noticeable.
I tend to flip my RAM out every 3-5 years and notice a significant improvement in performance. Other than that, though…
Like you put the ram back in the other way - like flipping a toast halfway through toasting?
Like you put the ram back in the other way
Like buy replacement sticks of RAM and insert it in place of the original sticks.
I think the word would be swap. I thought you put the sticks in different ports every once in a while and thought “does that help it last longer?” for a second.
Oh.
Well thanks anyway
i mean, if you’re running slow ram, upgrading to faster ram would definitely help, especially if you’re on a modern platform.
You should really just download more ram though…
download more ram
I’d sooner download a car
They’re invested in PC gaming as social capital where the performance of your rig contributes to your social value. They’re mad because you’re not invested in the same way. People often get defensive when others don’t care about the hobbies they care about because there’s a false perception that the not caring implies what they care about is somehow less than, which feels insulting.
Don’t yuck others’ yum, but also don’t expect everyone to yum the same thing.
Very well put! I’d also add that most people aren’t even really conscious that that’s the reason that they’re mad. There’s ways to express your negative opinion without stating it as a fact or downplaying the other person’s taste.
I’m very certain Anon isn’t just saying “nah, my rig works” to them when asked.
Maybe closer to “LMAO normies wasting money. fuckin coomsumers, upgrading for AAAA slop! LMFAO” into conversations they weren’t invited to.
The experience of playing modern games on a modern AAA “high end” PC is obviously going to be better if you care about things like ray-tracing and high framerates or resolution. You can’t really dispute that.
But it would be stupid to say you’re wrong if you just want to play that same game on your system if it actually runs. If the game is playable and you’re having fun, you’re doing it correctly.
I only upgrade when I start to see multiple games a year that just straight up don’t work on my computer.
If you don’t upgrade to Windows 11, you can’t use Recall, which is a great reason not to upgrade to Windows 11.
I upgraded to Linux. It worked out well for me since I mostly pay retro games and games from yesteryear.
I upgraded a Chromebook to Linux recently. That was a huge bump in performance that I wasn’t expecting, not even just for gaming.
What OS was it running before? ChroomeOS is Linux right?
Technically yes, and so is Android. But neither work the way you’d expect a typical Linux distro to work.
Yeah it was ChromeOS. It is sort of linux, but google is an advertising company. You can’t ask them to not collect your data and recently they gave up pretending like they cared about user privacy. Linux is none of that. Complete opposite.
If you compare it to linux side by side, chromeOS is basically the alternate reality evil twin with the goatee
What distro? Did you follow a guide?
installed Lubuntu 24 on it using a guide that loosely applied to the low end chromebook I have. Link here
Using chrome browser on ChromeOS was snappy but any other browser I used with addons was an awful and laggy experience. The difference in performance was an unexpected win, but I primarily did it to ditch SpywareOS.
Going forward I’m probably going to just look for chromebooks to convert to linux for a daily driver laptop because you dont have to pay a premium for the spyware like you do with a windows laptop
I upgraded to Linux and can still play every game I’ve tried to play
If you want to stay with Windows for whatever reason, even 11, I can recommend Revision Playbook. It locks your installation and scrapes out the crap like unwanted updates and features like AI bullshit, Edge, Telemetry and whatnot. You can even manually install Apps from the Store without the Store if you like to. Security patches and selective updates come only via manual download from MS catalogue in my case, but you can automate this too with some tools.
People want shiny new things. I’ve had relatives say stuff like “I bought this computer 2 years ago and it’s getting slower, it’s awful how you have to buy a new one so quickly.” I suggest things to improve it, most of which are free or very cheap and I’d happily do for them. But they just go out and buy a brand new one because that’s secretly what they wanted to do in the first place, they just don’t want to admit they’re that materialistic.
Can I have some tips too?
Appreciate the meme but yea that is one way to probably improve performance. Or upgrade the RAM, clean the fans, reapply thermal compound, clear out temporary files, disable unused services or reinstall Windows if they really need it just to run Chrome and Zoom which is all they do.
Even just blowing out all the dust from a passive cooler (under the CPU fan) can make your system run a good 10°C cooler.
hardware isn’t as impactful to performance as software imo, just getting rid of bloat services can improve the perceived performance for every day tasks a ton.
btw I don’t really get why increasing the amount of ram is thought of as the first step by most normie consumers, if you have enough it’s enough and even my 2gb machine runs everything fine
You’d be amazed at the startup and program opening time gains on older computers’ when you change in the HDD that is stuck at read/write speeds of 5MB/s for a SSD
oh yeah SSDs are great, but RAM, thermals, etc don’t matter much
If RAM upgradable to dual channel it could still make a big difference
Clean the fans.
Reinstall the os clean. That’s usually why a new computer feels snappy: it’s just fresh.
Also dont forget to reapply thermal paste. Might help with overheating.
No chance I’m advising normies to mess with thermal paste on their own.
Free:
- clean fans and heatsink - others mentioned, and the reason is better cooling so it doesn’t throttle
- kill unnecessary services - that’s why reinstalling works
- install Linux - not reasonable for everyone, but Linux uses far fewer resources
- delete old files - as disks get full, it takes longer to find somewhere for files to go; try to leave 10-20% free
- try a small overclock - many older CPUs can give a little more without upgrading cooling; only do it if temps look good
Relatively cheap (<$200 each):
- upgrade drive to NVMe - huge difference if running an HDD, still noticeable of running a SATA SSD
- add more RAM (only if you’re constantly running out)
- upgrade CPU - esp if AMD since they release lots of CPUs for the same socket
It really depends on what’s making it slow though.
for deleting files qdirstat/windirstat are insanely good pieces of software
NVMe
This part was huge you for me. Almost same as from HDD to SSD.
i didnt notice as much difference
Maybe your relatives don’t like you. It’s a petty but valid reason to ignore perfectly good advice.
I have heard that Windows underclocks your CPU over time, to make you buy a new computer, and so Microsoft can get money from the new PC’s preinstalled Windows license.
I am not really sure if that’s true though.
I have heard that Windows underclocks your CPU over time
I would say this is half true. Microsoft is known for pushing lots of software updates with unwanted features, so it’s probably that a computer will feel slower over time.
However that’s not an underclock it’s just that the CPU can’t keep up with that much bloatware.
People live in times of historic standstill. Society barely develops in a meaningful and hopeful way. Social relationships stagnate or decline. So they look for a feeling of progress and agency in participation in the market and consuming.
They don’t realize this because they aren’t materialistic enough, in a sense that they don’t analyse their condition as a result of political and cultural configuration of their lives so that real agency seems unavailable