4 Reasons to reconsider upgrading your PC.

With the release of Nvidia's latest flagship cards, I, and many other PC gamers, have been bombarded with the same old enticing phrases, such as “The World’s fastest graphics card”, that have come to play with our desires, but with advent of unoptimized games lately and the fact that the last major release of a graphic milestone was in 2007, are these top-of-the-line hardware really necessary? Nope. Why?

An 8800gtx can still max out games today.

                                                                     " Your best purchase ever!"



It is surprising and baffling at the same time that a three year old piece of hardware has lasted for so long and yet remained so strong. Indeed, you’d be hard-pressed to count the games that this beast of a bygone generation cannot max out, unless you are counting unoptimized trash, but really who bothers counting unoptimized trash anyway?

                                                                                "unoptimized trash"

Things may not be what they seem.

Remember three years ago when your gaming buddies told you not to bother with a Q6600 because pretty much no game benefits from having a quad core, but you bought one anyway because you figured out that four is better than two then, a week later, your buddies dropped by your house to find you weeping alone in the dark because the e8400,which was in the same price range, just came out and outperformed your quad in about 95% of the games? Yeah, you do.

There is no such thing as “Future-Proofing.”

Ask any PC enthusiast, who has been upgrading his PC since Quake, if he considers upgrading his PC with the intent of “Future-Proofing”. The short answer will be No. In fact, he will proceed to tell you that you should upgrade with the intent of playing games that have been released or games that will be released in the near future, but not the ones in three years time. Sadly, this is true because we have no idea what may happen in three years time, perhaps a new version of direct x will be released or the hardware you intend on buying may become obsolete, so buying hardware with the intent of “Future-Proofing” may, one day, leave you disappointed.

The price/performance ratio decreases significantly after a GTX 260 with a high end dual core processor, such as an E8400. (MARCH 2010)

I believe that any piece of hardware more expensive than any of those two is superfluous and totally unnecessary, unless you are playing on a resolution higher than 1680x1050 or like playing games with 16x AA.  They are enough for maxing out most games except, well, unoptimized trash, but really who bothers buying unoptimized trash anyway?

                                                                                "unoptimized trash"