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Have you dreamed of owning the perfect gaming computer, only to be rudely awakened by the price tags on such units? For many of these rigs, $2000 seems to be the ground floor.
What if I told you there was a perfectly respectable gamer sitting in front of you right now. Yes, that internet and homework PC that you balance your checkbook on and flip through your email with can handle the hottest games.
If you give it a little help.
The kind of help I want you to give it is more RAM, and a new graphics card. Really, taking it objectively, these two items can do more to improve your game play than anything else in your PC. And that includes the CPU.
While a faster processor is wonderful to have, games are memory hogs. They need lots of system memory, and video RAM. If you invest a relatively small amount of money in more RAM, and a memory-rich graphics card, your PC will have the capacity it needs to play almost any game.
Capacity equates to speed. It means little or no dependence on virtual memory. It means graphics delivered at top resolution. The gaming experience moves a very large step closer to reality.
Each of these upgrades can be performed easily. To add RAM, all you need is an empty slot. The module plugs in, and is recognized by your operating system when you boot up.
A new graphics card can be installed in a PCI slot, an AGP, or if the motherboard is fairly new, a PCI Express. That Express slot is blistering fast, but there’s plenty of speed in the other two as well.
To take out the old card, you remove only one screw, and pull it from the slot. Plug the other in, and anchor it with the screw. When you boot up, Windows may ask you to load a driver. That’s all there is to it. |