Greentext

It's easy to go too far in either direction instead of just doing what fits your needs (which in fairness, can sometimes be difficult to precisely pin down). Blindly going "it's old, I need to upgrade" or "it still runs, it's not worth upgrading" will sometimes be right but it's not exactly tailored advice.

Someone I know was holding out for ages on a 4790K (2014), and upgraded a year or two ago to a then-current-gen system and said the difference it made to their workflow was huge - enough that they actually used that experience to tell their boss at work that the work systems (similar to what they had had themselves) should get upgraded.

At the end of 2022 I had had my current monitor(s) for about 10 years and had spent years of hearing everyone saying "wow upgrading my monitor was huge", saying that either 1440p was such an upgrade over 1080p and/or that high refresh rate (120+Hz) was such an upgrade over 60Hz. I am (or at least was in the past) a pretty competitive player in games so you'd think I'd be a prime candidate for it, but after swapping from a 60Hz 1200p screen to a 144Hz 1440p screen for my primary monitor I... honestly could barely notice the difference in games (yes, the higher refresh rate is definitely enabled, and ironically I can tell the difference easily outside of games lol).

I'm sensitive to input latency, so I can (or at least could, don't know if I still can) easily tell the difference between the responsiveness of ~90 FPS and ~150 FPS in games, so it's extra ironic that pumping the refresh rate of the screen itself didn't do much for me.

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.

it all depends on what you want to do with it, if it works for your use case all the better!

I'll do you ~one~two better: my computer's from 2012. I can play even modern games on high settings sometimes. It wasn't even a high specced one at the time. I think I put about $1200 into the actual components AND monitor/keyboard.

My 2009 i5 750 (oc at 3.6) can still play any game I throw at it.

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've upgraded pretty much everything in my 2009 PC and only just finally bought a new CPU. I just need a new case.for everything. The last straws were Elden Ring being CPU bottle necked at 20 FPS and Helldivers 2 requiring some instruction that wasn't on my CPU.

The only thing I am a bit sad about (on my fairly recent machine) is that I can't really enjoy is Ray tracing but that's just because I went AMD 🤷

My 2008 librebooted t440p thinkpad Says hold my beer. Browses the web like its a 2025 desktop Its amazing Except for the compile times (it runs gentoo :D)

I had an i5-2500k from when they came out (I think 2011? Around that era) until 2020 - overclocked to 4.5Ghz, ran solid the whole time. Upgraded graphics card, drives, memory, etc. but that was incremental as needed. Now on an i7-10700k. The other PC has been sat on the side and may become my daughters or wife's at some point.

Get what you need, and incremental upgrades work.

Not an gamer but still using a PC bought when Win8 first came out

I do need to upgrade my CPU specifically, but that's because I've got it second hand several years ago, when it already hasn't been very good

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...

Yeah I'm daily-ing a laptop from 2019 with an i7-9750, a GTX1650, and 16 gb of RAM. No upgrades except storage. The GPU is the only thing that sometimes makes me go "hm."

4770/1060 gang over here. Upgrading to a free 9600 this weekend.

I was with them until my girlfriend gifted me a 180Hz monitor last year and now I can't deal with less than 90 FPS so I had to finally upgrade my RX580 (I just found out it stopped getting driver updates in January 2024 so I guess it was about time). High refresh rates ruin you.

Gaming PCs are like cars, imo. You should be trying to get like 8 years out of them before you replace it.

Unlike most cars, most gaming PCs can then upgraded. Then they can be repurposed.

Still have a PC after 12 years that my brother is using

Because you're the lemming who isn't running off the cliff. It pisses them off.

I still use a Thinkpad T440p :3

I’d answer Anon by saying that the other gamers need to feel validated, and justified in spending thousands of dollars upgrading their PCs.

My current PC is an asus rog with a gtx 1070 (and a piece of shit screen that gets all fucky if it heats) that I bought used, back in late 2019. The old hard drive failed some time ago and I had to change it, sometimes the main SSD seems to get strangely fucky (BSODs followed by disk scans), too, as does the memory (BSODs about "corrupted_page_memory", also complete freezes under Linux Mint, not even ctrl alt F1 worked), which makes me think the components aren't exactly high quality (considering how shitty the screen is and asus in general in the past years, that's no surprise)

Still, I fully intend to keep this bad boy as my main workhorse for at least another 2 years, possibly longer. After that, I'll probably relegate it to being the party game machine.