Hardcore hardware

Which components are worthy of your hard earned cash? Bennett Ring rounds up the current market and puts it all on test.

When lust for the latest gear turns into a finely tuned plan to upgrade, it’s time to sell your grandma and get dirty with your PC. But which components are worthy of your hard earned cash? Bennett Ring rounds up the current market and puts it all on test.

One of the best things about being a PC owner is the ability to upgrade as we see fit. One of the worst things about being a PC owner, at least for people like us, is the need to upgrade. It’s a double-edged, +21 Blade of Doom – on the one hand it allows us to keep light years ahead of those kiddy consolers and always have a machine that is perched on the bleeding edge of technology. But on the other hand it can cost upwards of a grand a year to keep a PC that is up to speed and able to run the latest, most demanding workhorse applications (aka games).

But if you know when to upgrade, and how to upgrade smartly, it needn’t be a fiscally challenging time.

Beyond the hype The most obvious thing to keep in mind is to take the marketing hype with a grain of salt. Some would have you believe that every single product brought to the market makes your existing hardware a bagillion times more powerful, while using a tenth of the juice. Just wait for the advertising blitz that will accompany the new dual-core CPUs if you don’t believe us.

These chips are already being hyped as jet-speed, number-obliterating processing behemoths, yet for many of the most demanding tasks the first batch of these new chips will actually be slower than the existing generation of single-core CPUs.

The key to cutting through these mounds of overblown claims is to wait until a product hits. Then do a little research, be it via your favourite computing enthusiast mag (of course) or via some of the (few) reputable online review sites. Only then will you know if a component is as truly revolutionary as its makers claim. Or more importantly, if it’s something for you.

If you keep an eye on hardware developments, you’ll notice that each component tends to follow a fixed cycle, where everything happens on a predictable schedule. And funnily enough, each of the competing manufacturers of these components will just happen to bring its latest tech to market at the same time as its competitors. In between these major product releases will be refreshes of the last major innovation. So it’s best to time your upgrade to occur just after a major innovation, rather than getting the incremental improvement that’s offered by a refresher product. Another thing to keep in mind is that upgrading on a relatively frequent basis, say, every 12 months, can actually cost you less in the long run than upgrading every couple of years. If you do upgrade regularly, it’s possible to sell off your older parts at a decent price, before they’re only good for building an MP3 box running Linux.

Lastly, it needs to be said that with the rapid development of technology there will always be a newer, better upgrade around the corner. In the next couple of months we’ll see brand new architectures from NVIDIA, ATI, Intel and AMD. And if we waited for those technologies to hit, there would be something else on the horizon. The key is to upgrade at the right time and accept that you’ll have to do so again in the future.

Here to help you is the Atomic upgrade guide, your handbook for the latest gear to help your PC rise from the ashes of obsolescence. Note that because of the huge variety of products available we decided to test the underlying chipsets that power them when it came to motherboards and video cards. This allows you to make an informed decision about what baseline tech to go for, and then choose from the variety of products based on the additional bundled features and software.