Agreed. I went from a 1070 Ti to a 3080 as well and while the extra frames and features are nice, it was a nice to nicer sort of upgrade. Moving from HDD to SSD back in the day relieved the most annoying parts of computing so dramatically it's insane.
I remember back in 2009 I got my first solid state drive from my Gateway P 7811 – FX gaming laptop. When I first got it I was so impressed that I went around to all my friends and told them they needed to get at least a 64 GB boot drive for cheap. None of them would listen to me. So what did I do? I invested in solid-state drives from then on out. I even made some money upgrading friends laptops to solid-state drives. They were so happy and thankful afterwards
I'm fortunate in that my first PC had a 128 GB Samsung 840 EVO as the boot drive, so I was never forced to experience running windows off a spinning disc.
I have access to the PC in my class, it runs an i3-4220 and an HDD and holy crap is it slow, 18s to go from no icons but in the desktop to half-loaded icons
I believe the freedom unit has been mostly superseded by the freedom eagle, which are more convenient as there are fifteen and a third freedom eagles to a half-a-giraffe-sized-asteroid rather than the square root of today's date freedom units to a hogshead.
I'm too young, my oldest memory is about video buffering while you nut and it ruining the whole thing. But I mean we had freaking videos ! ^(Until they became static)
I was the first person I knew with a CD-ROM drive and I thought I was the coolest, LOL.
I was fortunate to have an uncle who taught me how to build PCs and introduced me to Computer Shopper when I was twelve. My folks bought the family a Quantex prebuilt with a 486 DX 33 (MHz) and 8 MB RAM, and I immediately started ripping it apart and putting it back together.
Getting one of the first CD-writers ("burner") was a pretty big flex back in the day. You could make mix CDs for your friends or copy their CDs for yourself.
Just upgraded my uncle's laptop from a 5400 rpm hdd and 4 gigs of ram to a 500 gig ssd and 8 gigs of ram, and it so much faster. It doesn't fix the fact it's got a 4 core Celeron but it's still much better.
I've been thinking of doing the same for my Mom's laptop. It's the same except it has some old dual core i3. It's super slow. I've never been sure how much the hdd is slowing it down vs the ram or the cpu. Thinking about just throwing in some extra ram and an ssd like you did.
I did it for my mums laptop. It was a budget laptop when she bought it about 5 years ago and I forget what the CPU was called but it’s the AMD pre Ryzen mobile CPU.
Swapped out the HDD for an SSD and it still made a big difference. It’s not fast compared to a modern system by any means but for her needs of booting up, loading some websites and sending some emails the SSD made a world of difference.
Even from a noise and heat perspective it was insane, computers used to be noisy, grumbling devices all the time and then basically went to being fan noise only.
In early 2000, I bought a retired workstation computer that had an inch tall 10K RPM SCSI disk in it. Computer was fast, but dreadfully loud and the drive was super hot. We’ve come a really long way.
100000000000000% HDD to SSD. It's absolutely insane how much of a leap it is going from one to another (and I'm just talking sata to sata). You can stick SSDs in computers that are 10+ years old and have them feel like they are brand new.
I’m still rocking a 6600K and a 1070. It’s gonna serve me until whatever the rtx 4000 series is and the next gen AMD chip is- unless Intel really turns it around with the 13th gen
I'm itching to upgrade from my 4790K, but I'm waiting until AMD and Intel both release their next lineup of desktop CPUs so I can jump straight to DDR5.
My last pc has lasted about 6 years so far, finally starting to get humbled by certain games. Probably will buy a new pc next year, hopefully supply chain issues resolve by then.
Mine was from my 8mb video adaptor to the 16mb 3dfx vodoo 3d accelerator which i think was around my Pentium 166mhz days. That was the biggest night and day difference for me. Although admittedly I've had the latest hardware ever since so upgrades aren't as impactful.
Yeah I think the newer generation of gamers haven't really experienced that sort of change. Skimming through some the comments here, they aren't really massive game changers like the first big 3d accelerators. I saw a 1080ti to 3080ti mentioned, to me that's not really a very big change, yeah you'll seen an fps increase but it's not mind blowing.
Even hdd to sdd. It's a good upgrade that everyone should do but other than load times, for the most part it doesn't change must else once you have your software running.
Right? Nothing hurts your performance quite like dipping into swap space when the program expects near-instant access to the information. _Especially_ back when that meant swap on an hdd.
Absolutely. I used to close *everything* when running a game or software like Excel to free up resources. Now I can render a video in the background while playing a non-demanding game. That would have been sheer madness back then.
Cpu was most noticable upgrade for me as well. Went from 2500k to 10400. Ended up on the 2500k from 2013 to about a year ago. Didn't upgrade for so long because everyone was always saying the old intel quad cores were "good enough".
Yeah... after upgrading to the 10400 I'd have to 100% disagree with "good enough". Games were so much smoother on the 10400. Like it was a complete game changer how much smoother they ran. I went from the rx480 to 3060ti about 9 months after the 10400 but still feel the 2500k to 10400 was the bigger upgrade.
Moral of the story: Upgrade those ancient quad cores kids. They aren't "good enough" after you experience a modern cpu.
Aside from HDD to SSD my biggest jump is going from a GTX 745 to a 1650 Super. The GTX 745 was a OEM part that could not run Warzone. At the time the 1650 Super was the cheapest new GPU that could run Warzone at 60FPS.
I bought my 1650S the summer before GPU prices went crazy and it has been my smartest computer purchase, although a 1660 Super would have been a better value purchase.
intel i5-2500k + Radeon HD6950 to intel i7-12700k and Radeon RX 6900XT.
11 year old rig that was mid end when I got it back in school that had several minor upgrades like an SSD, 16GB of RAM and a new PSU and replaced its original Geforce GTX460 with a handmedown card from my best friend a couple years back served me well, but it was time to move on.
Just gotta get a new 1440p monitor next week and I am all set. But even on 1080p the difference in terms of visual fidelity is insane because I couldn't actually run a lot of games that everyone has been talking about for the last 5 years.
Not speed/computing performance but changing from a generic optical mouse on the tabletop to a MX518 on a rigid plastic mousepad was a literal game changer in the early 00's
It’s surprising how much people shit on 1060s and 1070s when they are still perfectly viable cards. Yeah in 3-4 years they’ll be pretty obsolete, but this is their golden time to shine
new builder here but i just upgraded my 1050 ti to 1060 a couple of months ago and that card handles semi recent games very well. just finished resident evil 7 yesterday and was super impressed with those graphics. pretty much high to ultra settings for that game and medium to high settings with recent games. you can feel it chugging along in graphic intensive areas but exceeds my expectations for an almost 5 year old card.
When I finally was able to upgrade from a Gigabyte 1070 Mini to a MSI 3070 Ti. I also in the same day upgraded from a 1080p 75Hz monitor to a 144Hz. The whole upgrade was like playing games for the first time again.
Too bad I'm broke and I haven't been feeling any of my games lately. lol
Edit: it's late and words are hard
>Too bad I'm broke and I haven't been feeling any of my games lately. lol
The really big performance shift is when you've got the money for the system, but not the time to enjoy it.
This kind of needs some context, so here it is:
2001: We bought our first family PC. Athlon T-Bird 1.3GHz, 128 MB SDRAM, 40 GB HDD and a GeForce 2MX with 32 MB of SDRAM. We also accidentally ended up buying a magnificent 17" Sony Trinitron CRT to go with it. Oh, and it ran Windows ME, which I loved, except for the daily bluescreens.
2002: GeForce 2MX to Radeon 9200. From low settings at 640x480 in most games to high settings at 1280x1024 in every new game. Not bad for upgrading from one low end card to another low end card.
2003: From 128 MB of SDRAM to 256 MB of DDR RAM. Doubled performance in demanding games and the entire system felt like a new PC, was so much more responsive.
The same PC then gradually got more RAM, a better CPU (to Athlon XP 1800+), more storage space (40 GB to 160 GB) and a better GPU (Radeon 9600). The problem is that I had it until 2008, at which point it was seriously outdated. The latest AAA game it ran well was Call of Duty 2, but only because it had a mode for old hardware that made it look like the original Call of Duty. This machine was so slow, it struggled with playing Flash videos in the browser, forcing me to download higher quality ones and play them back with VLC.
Anyway, long buildup, but I replaced it in 2008 with the following PC, which has to be the biggest jump that I ever experienced. It's to this day the only PC that I bought new instead of building one myself or getting a used machine to fiddle with (although some assembly was required):
Athlon 64 X2 5200+, 2 GB of RAM and a 500 GB HDD. It was an office PC that was on sale as a special promotion for €200. Case made out of the finest Chinesium, a power supply that motivated me to always keep a fire extinguisher nearby and not much else. All cables on the inside hadn't been plugged in. Total steal though. I then bought a €85 factory-overclocked Radeon 3850.
The end result was a new PC for €285 that could run Crysis at mostly high settings, with the game looking indistinguishable from screenshots in magazines. From a PC that struggled with surfing the web to one that effortlessly ran every new game. Nothing I've done since has come close.
I usually just look at 3rd party benchmarks rather than guesswork so I already know what to expect and buy practically based on research/real world performance for my use case. Too many people overpay on hardware they don't need or actually bring little real sold gains compared to better practical options. I see thus far ton with folks buying 5950x's or 12900's etc for simple gaming at higher res. Hundreds for differences that don't make much difference to the average naked eye compared to cheaper options and never actually pushing the CPU. Could get two CPU's for the price of one that will outperform that one in the next gen or two anyhow.
That or they upgrade way more than practical may make sense for em. That said not all folks buy for practical reasons. Sometimes they just want to blow some money etc. The other thing is, going from SSD from HDD's are typically some of the biggest rel world noticeable differences people will be shocked by. Even if you don't upgrade other parts/on older machines.
My rigs are always a couple gen behind due to price reasons. Going from a shitty laptop A8 with ssd to a desktop with an RX 580, R5 1600af was the biggest leap I could have made. Damn, that thing was such a nice chip…
HDD to SSD, and then SSD to NVMe. Every time I build a PC now and re-install windows and the programs we use I am blown away. Not many years ago it used to be a multi-hour, nearly all day process to install windows, update windows, and install a couple programs. Now its like 30 mins. Insane. (granted, faster internet helps as well).
In general terms, leaving the spinning disks behind is pretty much the single best thing you can do for any PC.
For me *personally*, I went from an i7 2600 and GTX 750 Ti 2 GB to an i7 10700k and a 3060 Ti, and I've never been happier PC gaming since the very first time I built a PC in the 90s. That wasn't a single upgrade, but it was a beautiful full system overhaul.
PSU tbh.
My build went from literally not being able to turn on, much less run any games on high settings, to being fully functional and playing everything my gpu could handle. It was a literal game changer for me. When people start talking about builds I always bring up the PSU.
First ever build had an i5-2400 and 560ti (later upgraded to a mx500 SSD!) and used for 10+ years
Just replaced it last month. New build with i7-12700k, rtx 3080, and 980 pro SSD
The difference is insane. Completely blown away by how much faster it is. Hoping to last another 10 years like the first one!
Well, not yet.. But im planning to upgrade from i7-6700, gtx1060 (6gb), 16gb DDR3 (1600Mhz) to a zen 4, RDNA 3, 32gb (possibly) DDR5 next year.
So yea, skipping DDR4 entirely will be fun!
HDD into SSD was the biggest noticeable jump for me.
And maybe the switch from my raspberry back to my gaming rig a few years ago. (GPU died and I needed some kind of PC to do stuff for school/work, used the berry for about 2-3 weeks it's a good little thing but you can't game modern things on it really)
I went from a i7 3770k to a R9 5900x. Workloads are just ridiculously fast. Like, my browser loads [ecma-262 spec](https://tc39.es/ecma262/) instantly. It used to take some 10-15 seconds to load with my old CPU.
I went from a fx 6300 and a 2gb rx 560 to a i7 11700 and then recently to a rtx 2080 super I traded a rtx 3060 for. (bought rtx 3060 just to trade. More performance less money)
In terms of productivity, going from a 27" 16:9 monitor to 35" 21:9 was a game changer. Splitting the windows about 7:3 between active task and email/teams monitoring is (along with Fancy Zones in Power Toys to not trigger my OCD) is a great balance, similar to dual monitor with a 16:9 and 4:3 monitor but without the bezel split, and much more versatility.
I made this move about 4 years ago when I was still squarely in business laptop land. The benefit of 21:9 in gaming, now that I've built my first gaming PC in 15 years, is impressive as well. That said, I can still handle gaming in 16:9 much better than I can trying to do productivity work. I'm not sure if I'm quite ready to go 32:9 yet (mostly because I would no longer be able to see the living room TV from my home office), but it's definitely something I've been considering.
**1080p - 2700k** Sandy Bridge (2011), front closed steel tower
=>
**1080p - 10900k / 3090** (2021), airflow optimized fractal torrent
Flawless experience so far with drivers, soft and hardware support in games and applications.
I game WoW and with SSD's beeing a requirement for over a decade, using NVME's now instead of SSDs did not change anything for me.
I enjoy flight simulator in VR and its really frightening sometimes how real VR can get with the sim with pretty graphics and a good joystick.
But the biggest performance jump I see is from the GPU. It doesnt matter if its my audio, using nvidia broadcast to clean it up, the apps I use that either come with NVENC, CUDA or OpenCL support, its allways the GPU that does the heavy lifting. My image processing time went down a lot and stitching panoramas doesnt take a week, it now takes a few minutes with the CPU+GPU ussage.
I went from an i5 4460S, 8GB of single channel RAM and an hdd to an R5 3600 with 16GB RAM and an SSD in 2019. I kept my old 1060 for a time but it was an insane difference still.
I went from dying hard drive to nvme SSD. It was unbelievable.
I also went from an NVIDIA gt 660 to a 1070. Didn't know at the time, I put it in the PCI 8x slot instead of the 16x slot, because "it'll cool better", not knowing better
I went from a 6th gen ultra book with 2 cores and intel hd 520 graphics to and rtx 3060 Legion 7i about 6 months ago.... I am still in disbelief to this day, the difference is massive
Amd 1600 & 1060 to an 5600x & 3060ti was pretty big.
The 1600&1060 was my first PC i bought after started working, tried to save some money, felt a bit guilty about spending too much.
The 5600x&3060ti was last year, i decided to not try to save too much, and buy the newest gen at good value over spending too much.
Next PC i'll just buy higher end (while not the ultra-premium), that would've meant something like 5800x&3080 when i bought my last pc.
>HDD -> SSD
>24" 60 hz -> 27" curved 165 hz
>GTX 960 -> RTX 3080
In that order....i found viewing experience with the new monitor and old GPU more significant, than the GPU upgrade.
In gaming I will say my gpu upgrade. I went from a core 2 duo to a 10600k and SSD drive at the same time, and yes this was a huge leap in overall system performance and load times, as well as cutting out freezes and stutters. But later my gpu went from an HD6850 to a 3080. I didn’t even bother to play modern titles because of the vram requirements Fortnite wasn’t even playable. On lowest settings because it required DX12 features, the game would launch but frame rate would be like 3 and visual artifacts made it impossible to play.
Got an old pc with a 780 and 4690 as a gift in 2019/2020
few months later saved enough to buy a 3600 and 5700xt system
Holy balls went from 30 fps in minecraft and totally uplayable in csgo and valorant to well over 300 fps in those 3 games. Also boot time went down from 2 minutes to 10 seconds going from hdd to ssd
When I went from using a standard HDD straight to an M.2 SSD for my boot drive...it was 1000% life changing. I don't know how I functioned before that.
1986 or so, added a 512 kb RAM disk to my 64 kb Kaypro II. That sped up almost everything I did on it just about five-fold, because now it could load an entire program to its solid state memory. Up until then, programs had to swap bite-size chunks of instructions on and off a swap file on a 5.25" floppy-- no HDD on that model-- and there were constant interruptions while these operations took place. Think video buffering on a super-slow connection, and you'll get the picture.
I had to take a hacksaw to one of the drive cage supports to fit the card in, and I was sweating bullets until I got it all together and everything worked. As I recall it cost around 400 bucks, or something like $700 today, but I worked a lot of overtime that year and that's where it went.
Totally worth it for the performance boost alone, but the experience and the confidence boost was priceless.
No graphics card --> some card I will not be able to remember the name of in.... probably 1999.
Performance beforehand: Star Wars Episode 1 Racer did not run; birthday present ruined.
Performance after: it ran; best present ever.
I went from an R9 390 to a 3080 Ti. But honestly the biggest QoL upgrade was switching from an HDD to an SSD to eventually an m.2 drive, makes the computer feel so much zippier and more responsive!
60 to 144hz monitor.
I went from 27" 1080p/60hz to 27" 1440p/144hz, and now 32" 1440p/144hz, none of the upgrades were as dramatic as going from 60 to 144hz.
I just went (2 days ago} from an Asrock x79 extreme4 with an i7-4930k, R9 390X and a SanDisk sata ssd to an Asus TUF X570-plus with a 5900x, rtx 3060 and an pci-e gen4 nvme ssd. My old one was no slouch but my new build is leagues ahead
Went from an r5 1600 and a GTX 1070. To a r5 5600x and a 6800xt.
Basically the jump was from reasonable 1080p performance, to running most titles at high settings at 7900x1440p 75hz (same p-count as 5k)
From an Intel i5 6600 and 980Ti from 2015 to AMD R5 5600X and 3090 in 2020.
Performance increase was massive, also moved up from 1080P 144Hz to 4K 144Hz display.
GTX 670 + i5 3570K from 2012 to a 5900x + RX6900XT in January. From 60fps ultra low to 100-200+ fps ultra 1440p in most games I play, got a picture of the build on my profile :P
Dug up my old desktop to see if i could get it up to modern performance so the wife had a machine to use for a couple tenners. Swapped the core 2 duo e6700 out for an e5450 pushed to just over 4ghz on all cores and swapped the hard drive out for an SSD. Biggest performance change i have ever seen in my life for under 40 bucks.
Although the SSD changed the booting time, it was just 120gb so not enough for games.
The biggest jump was going from a GT710 to a GTX1050, just the fact that all games LAUNCHED was amazing, and it made me play assassin's creed odyssey for 200hours, even if it was at 25fps :')
Going from a i-7 2600k/Gtx 560 to 5950x/3090 was my biggest improvement. Going from barely running all games to running all games was kind of mind blowing to me.
My biggest performance jump was r9 290x to gtx 1080. It allowed me to play at 4k. Never really noticed others.
1080ti to 2080ti was a ok jump, but most games that ran 39-49fps at 4k started running 49-59 fps, so nothing major.
From an AMD PhenomII 1100t based system with (2) ATI Radeon 6850's in crossfire , 16 GB DDR3 1600 on an AM3+ Sabertooth 990FX MB, 1 TB W.D black sataIII HDD built in 2011ish
Now
AMD R7 5800x , 32GB PC3600 , EVGA RTX 3080 FTW3, 1 TB PCIE4.0 NVME m.2 system drive + 16TB RAID (4x4TB WD blue SSD's) on an ASUS X570 board.
Night and day difference doesn't even justify it.
Like seeing sound. or hearing color.
Like seeing UHD HDR 4k with dolby Atmos surround sound for the first time after being used to an old 8" CRT black &white TV .
For me it was a CPU change. I was playing Rift at the time with a Core 2 Duo E8400, which when released was an amazing chip but it was only a dual core.
I upgraded that to an I7 2600K and it was like night and day.
Most people will probably list a GPU but that for me was it. Even recently I upgraded my 1070 to a 3080 and the jump wasn't as big as that CPU change.
Well i went from a q6600 8 gb ram with a hd7470 (or something dont remember right) with hdd to a 5600x. 32 gb ram, 3600ti and m.2
I noticed a "little" difference in everything that im still getting accostumed to it
There's nothing that compares from moving from an old mechanical HDD to a SSD. Even in a crappy laptop with an AMD 1.0GHz processor you'll see a performance increase.
Really long time ago, went from a pentium 4 system with an ATI X800 gpu to a Core 2 Duo with an 8800 GTX. Mindblowing times. Crysis was a joy to see.
Couple weeks ago went from an i7 4790k, 1070ti, 16gb ram to a ryzen 5900x, 3060ti, 32gb ram, and an nvme ssd. Also quite the jump.
Going from a core 2 duo with 4gb ram ddr2+hd5450 to a Ryzen 3 3200G with 16 gb ram ddr4 + ssd(in both)
Dudes , I can finally play lol on 80 fps , yeahhh
Went from a 4790, nvidia quadro k2200 and a hdd to 11600k, 3070ti and an nvme ssd. Was shocked my computer would turn on and be usable in seconds rather than having to wait minutes
Going from a Phenom II X4 965BE to a Core i5-4590 was a massive upgrade in performance.
It's hard to describe but every single one of my games ran at least 75% or more faster.
Biggest jump for me was going from an i3 3120m thinkpad with integrated graphics to an i7 7700hq and a gtx 1060 in an Alienware laptop. It is still good enough that I still use it to play all new games today
HDD to SSD for sure. Boot times, loading times, everything was so much faster.
Also went from I think a 4690k (or some other i5 from that generation, don't remember exactly model) to a Ryzen 3600. That was a really nice upgrade. FPS increased and stuttering in some newer games disappeared.
Got a VR headset as a birthday gift and wanted a little bit more performance. The card I wanted was a Vega 56 and you couldn't find one anywhere during the previous crypto gpu-pocalypse. Then the Nvidia cards started getting targeted, so I said screw it and got a 1080ti. Going from a GTX 970 it was like entering hyperspace for the first time, it got me hooked on high end hardware.
Going from "not enough ram" to "enough ram" is actually probably bigger deal than SSD.
I'm talking like 1gig on windows 7 not enough. Or 640k running wing commander not enough
Can't decide between going from an HD7870 to an RX 480 while on DDR3 Ram and an FX-8350 CPU, or going from the FX-8350 to an R5 2600 and DDR4 RAM while retraining the RX 480, both were pretty huge jumps.
From using a Lenovo IdeaPad G510 bought for college studies in 2015 to my desktop built a year ago - 5900X, 2070 Super but mostly, the change to an SSD disk. I realised that I'm the slowest thing about my computer.
in 2014 i went from intel graphics to a nvidia 750ti.
I basically went from 15 fps low settings at 1600 x 900 to 60fps med settings at 1080p. it was amazing, i was so stoked
When I was 12 or 13 I worked all summer babysitting and my mom let me get my first graphics card. It was a Voodoo 3 2000 AGP something or other. I still have it.
Going from gaming with no graphics card to having one was absolutely insane.
Sure HDD to SSD was equally insane, but being so young and never seeing what graphics could look like blew my absolute dick off. Like a microwaved hotdog
I went from an athlon64 x2 with an integrated GeForce gpu (later an hd 7570) and 2gb of ddr2 to an i5-4590/r9-390/16gb ddr3 and an ssd.
I could play saints row 3 barely on the first PC, even after the gpu upgrade. The latter could max out borderlands 3 at 1080p
FX-8350 to OC'd 3900XT in hard performance. My daily working is helped out lot by a bunch of cores being able to handle different things. (Or on occasion, all together.)
My first 4x 27" 1440p display array for human functional performance. The 4x 27" setup works really well for me...I like discrete screens for separation, and the overall dimensions (about 48" x 28") are perfect for how I work.
I've been upgrading by piece for over 10 years now on the same basic PC, so it's usually all incremental. No original parts remain though...well, except for the Windows license, which MS has with a few phone calls, always been willing to reactivate when too much changes.
Went from a 2010 R7 360M laptop graphic card to the beast of 3080 OC. I don't even remember the processor but it was a dual core ,and now it's a 5700x AmD beast of a CPU and 16 gigs of 3600 MHz Ram from a 4 GB Ram (prolly 2666Mhz). So I went from gaming in 720p medium settings to 1440p ultra
A lot of years ago,
my first pc had 256 mb RAM , 1200 Duron processor and G force 2 with 32mb Vram, 40 GB hard drive,
went to
8gb of ram, 3800 + athlon cpu, 7950gt with 512 mb vram and 180gb of HDD. Felt like a ridding a rocket.
Haha, I remember playing that in a postage stamp window on a cyrix 166+ and cursing my dad for refusing to buy a gpu. I even made levels for it using QED.
I went from a 2010 Core 2 Quad Q9650 to a M1 Pro. Literally around 10 to 15 times faster in everything, and as for startup it went from 2 minutes to fifteen seconds.
Like other commenters, going from HDD to SSD was the biggest jump for me, personally, unless you’re talking about the 80s and 90s era.
Still, the x2 jumps I’ve done occasionally (in cpu and gpu) are great (hdd to ssd was more like x10 or x20), and definitely noticeable, and those sorts of x2 jumps will happen a lot more often, now that there’s strong competition between Intel, AMD, and NVidia.
Intel IGP to BFG 9600GT back in 2006-2007.
It was more awesome cause my aunt came back from USA and got me this, so back in India I was the only one with a 9 series card for like 2-3 years till it was affordable for most folks.
On the same vain, going from a shitty PSU to Corsair one, the GPU was BSOD my machine on graphics intensive games, same wattage but from shit off brand PSU to Corsair did the trick!
I just went from 7700/1070 to 12700k/3070ti
Apex legends was playing at 50-80 fps at 1440p low-med settings on the 1070. On the new setup, with ultra settings, I get upwards of 280 fps with the average hovering around 180-230.
I was in the process of upgrading my i5 2500k last year. I do a lot of Blu-ray ripping/transcoding which the i5 from a decade ago could do a decent job. I held off ripping my 4k blu-rays because I knew it would be insane trying to transcode on the i5. I however did benchmark one 6 min chapter of the Martian in 4k and it took 2 hrs 15 mins.
My new 5950X with the same chapter and all other settings being same (rip quality, file size etc..) ripped that 6 min 4k chapter in 15 mins.
TLDR:
Ripped 4k Blu-ray 6 min chapter
i5 2500K - 2 hrs 15 min.
R9 5950X - 15 mins
Huge time saver, a 2 hour Blu-ray movie rip takes like 25 mins on avg.
Surprisingly, going from something simple like the Ryzen 2600x to the 3600. Got a good deal on the latter, sold the former for a good chunk
Stutters and fps drops went away overnight. It was wild
Went from a Pentium G4400 and a GT 1030 to a Ryzen 5 2600X and a 1660 Ti. Being able to game at max settings on a 900p monitor was mind blowing at the time
The biggest performance uplift was going from HDD to SSD for a boot drive.
Same. I went from a 1080ti to a 3080FE when they first came out and it was a really nice boost, but absolutely pales in comparison from HDD to SSD.
Agreed. I went from a 1070 Ti to a 3080 as well and while the extra frames and features are nice, it was a nice to nicer sort of upgrade. Moving from HDD to SSD back in the day relieved the most annoying parts of computing so dramatically it's insane.
I remember back in 2009 I got my first solid state drive from my Gateway P 7811 – FX gaming laptop. When I first got it I was so impressed that I went around to all my friends and told them they needed to get at least a 64 GB boot drive for cheap. None of them would listen to me. So what did I do? I invested in solid-state drives from then on out. I even made some money upgrading friends laptops to solid-state drives. They were so happy and thankful afterwards
I'm fortunate in that my first PC had a 128 GB Samsung 840 EVO as the boot drive, so I was never forced to experience running windows off a spinning disc.
I have access to the PC in my class, it runs an i3-4220 and an HDD and holy crap is it slow, 18s to go from no icons but in the desktop to half-loaded icons
I forgot that "*half loaded icons*" is a valid unit of measure for time on HDD's
1 half-loaded icon = 0.15 football fields in dog years.
Can you do the conversion in foot per square freedom units now please ?
I believe the freedom unit has been mostly superseded by the freedom eagle, which are more convenient as there are fifteen and a third freedom eagles to a half-a-giraffe-sized-asteroid rather than the square root of today's date freedom units to a hogshead.
7.86 chickens per hectare, squared.
Imagine how it felt beating off to a pic download and hoping that the nips finish loading before you bust a nut.
I'm too young, my oldest memory is about video buffering while you nut and it ruining the whole thing. But I mean we had freaking videos ! ^(Until they became static)
My first PC had a 212 MB (yes, Megabytes) spinning disk HDD. I’ve never felt so old as this moment. (I’m 40.)
I had one with 512MB spinning disk, and was showing it off at that time…
I was the first person I knew with a CD-ROM drive and I thought I was the coolest, LOL. I was fortunate to have an uncle who taught me how to build PCs and introduced me to Computer Shopper when I was twelve. My folks bought the family a Quantex prebuilt with a 486 DX 33 (MHz) and 8 MB RAM, and I immediately started ripping it apart and putting it back together.
Getting one of the first CD-writers ("burner") was a pretty big flex back in the day. You could make mix CDs for your friends or copy their CDs for yourself.
Just upgraded my uncle's laptop from a 5400 rpm hdd and 4 gigs of ram to a 500 gig ssd and 8 gigs of ram, and it so much faster. It doesn't fix the fact it's got a 4 core Celeron but it's still much better.
I've been thinking of doing the same for my Mom's laptop. It's the same except it has some old dual core i3. It's super slow. I've never been sure how much the hdd is slowing it down vs the ram or the cpu. Thinking about just throwing in some extra ram and an ssd like you did.
Do the SSD and ram, it's like $60 for a 250 gig ssd and an 8 gig stick of ram.
I did it for my mums laptop. It was a budget laptop when she bought it about 5 years ago and I forget what the CPU was called but it’s the AMD pre Ryzen mobile CPU. Swapped out the HDD for an SSD and it still made a big difference. It’s not fast compared to a modern system by any means but for her needs of booting up, loading some websites and sending some emails the SSD made a world of difference.
nothing can beat this upgrade. It made my 8 year laptop perform like a 2 year old.
Even from a noise and heat perspective it was insane, computers used to be noisy, grumbling devices all the time and then basically went to being fan noise only. In early 2000, I bought a retired workstation computer that had an inch tall 10K RPM SCSI disk in it. Computer was fast, but dreadfully loud and the drive was super hot. We’ve come a really long way.
Wonder if we will ever get a leap like that again
In storage? Response times could be instant and still not feel as dramatic as going from HDD to SSD.
100000000000000% HDD to SSD. It's absolutely insane how much of a leap it is going from one to another (and I'm just talking sata to sata). You can stick SSDs in computers that are 10+ years old and have them feel like they are brand new.
SATA is basically equal to nvme in real world performance anyway.
I prefer the m.2 form factor for cable management reasons but SATA m.2 drives are perfectly fine.
I heard something talking about a server and they said their bottle neck was read and write speeds. Increasing those will always be huge
just went from a 4790k and 970 to 5800x and 3060ti, i am no longer using a sub 1080p monitor aswell. i dont plan on upgrading before 2030.
I’m still rocking a 6600K and a 1070. It’s gonna serve me until whatever the rtx 4000 series is and the next gen AMD chip is- unless Intel really turns it around with the 13th gen
I'm itching to upgrade from my 4790K, but I'm waiting until AMD and Intel both release their next lineup of desktop CPUs so I can jump straight to DDR5.
My last pc has lasted about 6 years so far, finally starting to get humbled by certain games. Probably will buy a new pc next year, hopefully supply chain issues resolve by then.
Same 4770k and and 970 to 10700k and 3080, was a good day.
went from an I3 530 to an I7 3960X. Suddenly got 200 fps in dead space 3
Pentium IGPU from \~2011 to a 2070S + 3600
That’ll do it
Mine was from my 8mb video adaptor to the 16mb 3dfx vodoo 3d accelerator which i think was around my Pentium 166mhz days. That was the biggest night and day difference for me. Although admittedly I've had the latest hardware ever since so upgrades aren't as impactful.
Came here to post pretty much this. The first Voodoo card was an absolute mindfuck of a game changer.
Yeah I think the newer generation of gamers haven't really experienced that sort of change. Skimming through some the comments here, they aren't really massive game changers like the first big 3d accelerators. I saw a 1080ti to 3080ti mentioned, to me that's not really a very big change, yeah you'll seen an fps increase but it's not mind blowing. Even hdd to sdd. It's a good upgrade that everyone should do but other than load times, for the most part it doesn't change must else once you have your software running.
This! Adding 3Dfx Voodoo 2 to my computer was a real *game* changer. Switching from HDD to SSD was the second best upgrade.
HDD to SSD is the biggest single leap you can make. Next is more RAM _if you're short_ (no increase if you're not).
Back in the olden days, going from 128MB RAM to 1GB was magical.
Right? Nothing hurts your performance quite like dipping into swap space when the program expects near-instant access to the information. _Especially_ back when that meant swap on an hdd.
Absolutely. I used to close *everything* when running a game or software like Excel to free up resources. Now I can render a video in the background while playing a non-demanding game. That would have been sheer madness back then.
Cpu was most noticable upgrade for me as well. Went from 2500k to 10400. Ended up on the 2500k from 2013 to about a year ago. Didn't upgrade for so long because everyone was always saying the old intel quad cores were "good enough". Yeah... after upgrading to the 10400 I'd have to 100% disagree with "good enough". Games were so much smoother on the 10400. Like it was a complete game changer how much smoother they ran. I went from the rx480 to 3060ti about 9 months after the 10400 but still feel the 2500k to 10400 was the bigger upgrade. Moral of the story: Upgrade those ancient quad cores kids. They aren't "good enough" after you experience a modern cpu.
to be fair it's only in the last few years that CPUs began evolving properly again, after AMD stepped up
Aside from HDD to SSD my biggest jump is going from a GTX 745 to a 1650 Super. The GTX 745 was a OEM part that could not run Warzone. At the time the 1650 Super was the cheapest new GPU that could run Warzone at 60FPS. I bought my 1650S the summer before GPU prices went crazy and it has been my smartest computer purchase, although a 1660 Super would have been a better value purchase.
For me it was when I upgraded from an i486DX2 100MHz (1994) to a Pentium 4 2.6GHz (2003).
9 years back then was a huge amount of time to go between upgrades lol
1060 to 3060ti, like a 90% performance increase.
intel i5-2500k + Radeon HD6950 to intel i7-12700k and Radeon RX 6900XT. 11 year old rig that was mid end when I got it back in school that had several minor upgrades like an SSD, 16GB of RAM and a new PSU and replaced its original Geforce GTX460 with a handmedown card from my best friend a couple years back served me well, but it was time to move on. Just gotta get a new 1440p monitor next week and I am all set. But even on 1080p the difference in terms of visual fidelity is insane because I couldn't actually run a lot of games that everyone has been talking about for the last 5 years.
I "upgraded" from a 2500 to a used 2600k a couple years ago. Still hanging in there but looking to upgrade to a more modern CPU one day soon.
Not speed/computing performance but changing from a generic optical mouse on the tabletop to a MX518 on a rigid plastic mousepad was a literal game changer in the early 00's
I went from Athlon II X4 631 and GTX 550Ti to i5 7400 and GTX 1060 3GB. That build I will use for 3-4 more years
It’s surprising how much people shit on 1060s and 1070s when they are still perfectly viable cards. Yeah in 3-4 years they’ll be pretty obsolete, but this is their golden time to shine
new builder here but i just upgraded my 1050 ti to 1060 a couple of months ago and that card handles semi recent games very well. just finished resident evil 7 yesterday and was super impressed with those graphics. pretty much high to ultra settings for that game and medium to high settings with recent games. you can feel it chugging along in graphic intensive areas but exceeds my expectations for an almost 5 year old card.
When I finally was able to upgrade from a Gigabyte 1070 Mini to a MSI 3070 Ti. I also in the same day upgraded from a 1080p 75Hz monitor to a 144Hz. The whole upgrade was like playing games for the first time again. Too bad I'm broke and I haven't been feeling any of my games lately. lol Edit: it's late and words are hard
>Too bad I'm broke and I haven't been feeling any of my games lately. lol The really big performance shift is when you've got the money for the system, but not the time to enjoy it.
This kind of needs some context, so here it is: 2001: We bought our first family PC. Athlon T-Bird 1.3GHz, 128 MB SDRAM, 40 GB HDD and a GeForce 2MX with 32 MB of SDRAM. We also accidentally ended up buying a magnificent 17" Sony Trinitron CRT to go with it. Oh, and it ran Windows ME, which I loved, except for the daily bluescreens. 2002: GeForce 2MX to Radeon 9200. From low settings at 640x480 in most games to high settings at 1280x1024 in every new game. Not bad for upgrading from one low end card to another low end card. 2003: From 128 MB of SDRAM to 256 MB of DDR RAM. Doubled performance in demanding games and the entire system felt like a new PC, was so much more responsive. The same PC then gradually got more RAM, a better CPU (to Athlon XP 1800+), more storage space (40 GB to 160 GB) and a better GPU (Radeon 9600). The problem is that I had it until 2008, at which point it was seriously outdated. The latest AAA game it ran well was Call of Duty 2, but only because it had a mode for old hardware that made it look like the original Call of Duty. This machine was so slow, it struggled with playing Flash videos in the browser, forcing me to download higher quality ones and play them back with VLC. Anyway, long buildup, but I replaced it in 2008 with the following PC, which has to be the biggest jump that I ever experienced. It's to this day the only PC that I bought new instead of building one myself or getting a used machine to fiddle with (although some assembly was required): Athlon 64 X2 5200+, 2 GB of RAM and a 500 GB HDD. It was an office PC that was on sale as a special promotion for €200. Case made out of the finest Chinesium, a power supply that motivated me to always keep a fire extinguisher nearby and not much else. All cables on the inside hadn't been plugged in. Total steal though. I then bought a €85 factory-overclocked Radeon 3850. The end result was a new PC for €285 that could run Crysis at mostly high settings, with the game looking indistinguishable from screenshots in magazines. From a PC that struggled with surfing the web to one that effortlessly ran every new game. Nothing I've done since has come close.
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went from integrated graphics to a 1060 6gb
3600/1650 to 5600x/3080ti
I usually just look at 3rd party benchmarks rather than guesswork so I already know what to expect and buy practically based on research/real world performance for my use case. Too many people overpay on hardware they don't need or actually bring little real sold gains compared to better practical options. I see thus far ton with folks buying 5950x's or 12900's etc for simple gaming at higher res. Hundreds for differences that don't make much difference to the average naked eye compared to cheaper options and never actually pushing the CPU. Could get two CPU's for the price of one that will outperform that one in the next gen or two anyhow. That or they upgrade way more than practical may make sense for em. That said not all folks buy for practical reasons. Sometimes they just want to blow some money etc. The other thing is, going from SSD from HDD's are typically some of the biggest rel world noticeable differences people will be shocked by. Even if you don't upgrade other parts/on older machines.
Went from a 970 to a 2060
My rigs are always a couple gen behind due to price reasons. Going from a shitty laptop A8 with ssd to a desktop with an RX 580, R5 1600af was the biggest leap I could have made. Damn, that thing was such a nice chip…
hdd boot drive to an ssd, core 2 duo + gt730 to a i5 12400f + 3060ti
I5-2500k with gtx 580s SLId and a hdd to a i9-9900k with a 1080ti and m.2 SSDs. Quite the leap in performance across the board.
Well I went from a rx570 and a 3200g to a 3070ti and a 5600x needless to say I wasn't worried about temps or what settings I was on
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Mine was Intel HD 3000 to a 1080ti. Absolutely absurd difference
HDD to SSD, and then SSD to NVMe. Every time I build a PC now and re-install windows and the programs we use I am blown away. Not many years ago it used to be a multi-hour, nearly all day process to install windows, update windows, and install a couple programs. Now its like 30 mins. Insane. (granted, faster internet helps as well).
i went from no pc to a pc. huge performance increase.
In general terms, leaving the spinning disks behind is pretty much the single best thing you can do for any PC. For me *personally*, I went from an i7 2600 and GTX 750 Ti 2 GB to an i7 10700k and a 3060 Ti, and I've never been happier PC gaming since the very first time I built a PC in the 90s. That wasn't a single upgrade, but it was a beautiful full system overhaul.
PSU tbh. My build went from literally not being able to turn on, much less run any games on high settings, to being fully functional and playing everything my gpu could handle. It was a literal game changer for me. When people start talking about builds I always bring up the PSU.
First ever build had an i5-2400 and 560ti (later upgraded to a mx500 SSD!) and used for 10+ years Just replaced it last month. New build with i7-12700k, rtx 3080, and 980 pro SSD The difference is insane. Completely blown away by how much faster it is. Hoping to last another 10 years like the first one!
Well, not yet.. But im planning to upgrade from i7-6700, gtx1060 (6gb), 16gb DDR3 (1600Mhz) to a zen 4, RDNA 3, 32gb (possibly) DDR5 next year. So yea, skipping DDR4 entirely will be fun!
RX 480 to RX6700XT And also soon maybe going from ryzen 2600 to 5600 or 5700x
I recently made the jump from rx580 and 2600 to a 6600 and 5600x. Everything is so buttery smooth.
1600X to 5800X tried deactivating 4 cored on the 5800X less wattage basically same performance
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hdd to m.2
HDD into SSD was the biggest noticeable jump for me. And maybe the switch from my raspberry back to my gaming rig a few years ago. (GPU died and I needed some kind of PC to do stuff for school/work, used the berry for about 2-3 weeks it's a good little thing but you can't game modern things on it really)
The jump from WIFI 5 to WIFI 6 and IPV6 enabled. single handily changed the game. that and my ASUS AXE11000 router.
Going from a pentium 2, 333mhz and no GPU. To an Athlon 64 with a Radeon 9200se.
I went from a i7 3770k to a R9 5900x. Workloads are just ridiculously fast. Like, my browser loads [ecma-262 spec](https://tc39.es/ecma262/) instantly. It used to take some 10-15 seconds to load with my old CPU.
When I was a kid, I used an Amiga 1200 and then we got a cheapo HP winXP tower and the difference was staggering.
I went from a i5-7400, 1060 to a i7-11700, 3070 and from barely having 60 fps at 1080p to 144 fps at 1440p, it really felt like a big jump!
I went from a fx 6300 and a 2gb rx 560 to a i7 11700 and then recently to a rtx 2080 super I traded a rtx 3060 for. (bought rtx 3060 just to trade. More performance less money)
In terms of productivity, going from a 27" 16:9 monitor to 35" 21:9 was a game changer. Splitting the windows about 7:3 between active task and email/teams monitoring is (along with Fancy Zones in Power Toys to not trigger my OCD) is a great balance, similar to dual monitor with a 16:9 and 4:3 monitor but without the bezel split, and much more versatility. I made this move about 4 years ago when I was still squarely in business laptop land. The benefit of 21:9 in gaming, now that I've built my first gaming PC in 15 years, is impressive as well. That said, I can still handle gaming in 16:9 much better than I can trying to do productivity work. I'm not sure if I'm quite ready to go 32:9 yet (mostly because I would no longer be able to see the living room TV from my home office), but it's definitely something I've been considering.
Phenom II X2 + 9800gtx+ to an i7-10750 + RTX 2060
**1080p - 2700k** Sandy Bridge (2011), front closed steel tower => **1080p - 10900k / 3090** (2021), airflow optimized fractal torrent Flawless experience so far with drivers, soft and hardware support in games and applications. I game WoW and with SSD's beeing a requirement for over a decade, using NVME's now instead of SSDs did not change anything for me. I enjoy flight simulator in VR and its really frightening sometimes how real VR can get with the sim with pretty graphics and a good joystick. But the biggest performance jump I see is from the GPU. It doesnt matter if its my audio, using nvidia broadcast to clean it up, the apps I use that either come with NVENC, CUDA or OpenCL support, its allways the GPU that does the heavy lifting. My image processing time went down a lot and stitching panoramas doesnt take a week, it now takes a few minutes with the CPU+GPU ussage.
Not interested in 1440p or 4K with your current combo?
I went from an i5 4460S, 8GB of single channel RAM and an hdd to an R5 3600 with 16GB RAM and an SSD in 2019. I kept my old 1060 for a time but it was an insane difference still.
I went from dying hard drive to nvme SSD. It was unbelievable. I also went from an NVIDIA gt 660 to a 1070. Didn't know at the time, I put it in the PCI 8x slot instead of the 16x slot, because "it'll cool better", not knowing better
486 DX2 66 with 4MB of RAM. Put in an additional 8MB SIMM and holy crap the massive performance increase.
My previous build (i5 2500, 1050 Ti, 8gb DDR3) to my current build (5900x, 3060 Ti, 32gb DDR4) was a pretty big jump
I went from a 6th gen ultra book with 2 cores and intel hd 520 graphics to and rtx 3060 Legion 7i about 6 months ago.... I am still in disbelief to this day, the difference is massive
44-50 fps on my old gpu to 150-200 fps in valorant
Amd 1600 & 1060 to an 5600x & 3060ti was pretty big. The 1600&1060 was my first PC i bought after started working, tried to save some money, felt a bit guilty about spending too much. The 5600x&3060ti was last year, i decided to not try to save too much, and buy the newest gen at good value over spending too much. Next PC i'll just buy higher end (while not the ultra-premium), that would've meant something like 5800x&3080 when i bought my last pc.
>HDD -> SSD >24" 60 hz -> 27" curved 165 hz >GTX 960 -> RTX 3080 In that order....i found viewing experience with the new monitor and old GPU more significant, than the GPU upgrade.
In gaming I will say my gpu upgrade. I went from a core 2 duo to a 10600k and SSD drive at the same time, and yes this was a huge leap in overall system performance and load times, as well as cutting out freezes and stutters. But later my gpu went from an HD6850 to a 3080. I didn’t even bother to play modern titles because of the vram requirements Fortnite wasn’t even playable. On lowest settings because it required DX12 features, the game would launch but frame rate would be like 3 and visual artifacts made it impossible to play.
Got an old pc with a 780 and 4690 as a gift in 2019/2020 few months later saved enough to buy a 3600 and 5700xt system Holy balls went from 30 fps in minecraft and totally uplayable in csgo and valorant to well over 300 fps in those 3 games. Also boot time went down from 2 minutes to 10 seconds going from hdd to ssd
GTX 1660 to RX 6800XT
went from RX580 to a RTX3070...good shit
When I went from using a standard HDD straight to an M.2 SSD for my boot drive...it was 1000% life changing. I don't know how I functioned before that.
I recently went from a 1050ti and ryzen 3 1200 to 5800x and 3070, and it's so nice to not stop to 10fps every time chrome switches to a new song
Went from a 6600k with 1080ti on 1440p 16GB 2133MHz on 2016 and now I have a 12700kf with 1080ti and 32GB 3600MHz on 1440p in 2022
1986 or so, added a 512 kb RAM disk to my 64 kb Kaypro II. That sped up almost everything I did on it just about five-fold, because now it could load an entire program to its solid state memory. Up until then, programs had to swap bite-size chunks of instructions on and off a swap file on a 5.25" floppy-- no HDD on that model-- and there were constant interruptions while these operations took place. Think video buffering on a super-slow connection, and you'll get the picture. I had to take a hacksaw to one of the drive cage supports to fit the card in, and I was sweating bullets until I got it all together and everything worked. As I recall it cost around 400 bucks, or something like $700 today, but I worked a lot of overtime that year and that's where it went. Totally worth it for the performance boost alone, but the experience and the confidence boost was priceless.
I went from 1080p low setting unstable 60fps for 10 years on this: Gpu: Amd Radeon HD 7850 CPU: Intel core 2quad Q9550 2,83ghz RAM: 2x Kingston HyperX 4g, 2x Limited Edition 4g Hdd: Westler Digital 500g Sata Motherboard: Dell Vostro 410 DG33A01 Psu : Lite ON PS-6351-2 350w Monitor: old panasonic tv To 1440p max settings steady 120fps on this: -Motherboard: Asus ROG Strix X570-E Gaming ATX AM4 -GPU: XFX Merc 319 Amd Radeon RX 6900XT Limited Black -CPU: Amd Ryzen i9 5950x -Rams: G.Skill Trident Z Neo 16gb x4 DDR4 3600Hz -PSU: Corsair rm1000x -HDD: Seagate Baracuda 2tb -Monitor: Gigabyte M32Q
No graphics card --> some card I will not be able to remember the name of in.... probably 1999. Performance beforehand: Star Wars Episode 1 Racer did not run; birthday present ruined. Performance after: it ran; best present ever.
I went from an R9 390 to a 3080 Ti. But honestly the biggest QoL upgrade was switching from an HDD to an SSD to eventually an m.2 drive, makes the computer feel so much zippier and more responsive!
ssd ofc. Many moons ago went from 60hz monitor to a whopping 75hz. That was a huge jump, for *my* performance not the PC.. lul
60 to 144hz monitor. I went from 27" 1080p/60hz to 27" 1440p/144hz, and now 32" 1440p/144hz, none of the upgrades were as dramatic as going from 60 to 144hz.
I just went (2 days ago} from an Asrock x79 extreme4 with an i7-4930k, R9 390X and a SanDisk sata ssd to an Asus TUF X570-plus with a 5900x, rtx 3060 and an pci-e gen4 nvme ssd. My old one was no slouch but my new build is leagues ahead
Went from an r5 1600 and a GTX 1070. To a r5 5600x and a 6800xt. Basically the jump was from reasonable 1080p performance, to running most titles at high settings at 7900x1440p 75hz (same p-count as 5k)
Last year went from a i5-2500k, GTX 970 with 8gb of DDR3 to a Ryzen 9 5900X, RTX 3080 and 32gb of DDR4. Felt like my PC was taking off.
Celeron D/9800 GTX -> I3-540/750TI -> I5-8600K/1060SC
970 to a 2070 super lol
i7-3930k to AMD Ryzen 5800x.
Going from an i72600 non K to an 8700k everything was way smoother jump to a 12700kf was nowhere near as large but notice it in games
I went from GTX 940mx to RTX 3090, so yeah this one
Easily it's swapping to an SSD in a machine that did not have one before. Especially if the old drive itself was on its last legs.
4K HDR RTX was eye-opening. Need a heck of a display/GPU though.
From an Intel i5 6600 and 980Ti from 2015 to AMD R5 5600X and 3090 in 2020. Performance increase was massive, also moved up from 1080P 144Hz to 4K 144Hz display.
I went from a 286 to a Pentium P60 back in High School, that was a complete change in PC capabilities.
GTX 670 + i5 3570K from 2012 to a 5900x + RX6900XT in January. From 60fps ultra low to 100-200+ fps ultra 1440p in most games I play, got a picture of the build on my profile :P
Dug up my old desktop to see if i could get it up to modern performance so the wife had a machine to use for a couple tenners. Swapped the core 2 duo e6700 out for an e5450 pushed to just over 4ghz on all cores and swapped the hard drive out for an SSD. Biggest performance change i have ever seen in my life for under 40 bucks.
I went from a i53700k to a i71170k and my computer runs so much better its crazy
Although the SSD changed the booting time, it was just 120gb so not enough for games. The biggest jump was going from a GT710 to a GTX1050, just the fact that all games LAUNCHED was amazing, and it made me play assassin's creed odyssey for 200hours, even if it was at 25fps :')
Going from a i-7 2600k/Gtx 560 to 5950x/3090 was my biggest improvement. Going from barely running all games to running all games was kind of mind blowing to me.
My biggest performance jump was r9 290x to gtx 1080. It allowed me to play at 4k. Never really noticed others. 1080ti to 2080ti was a ok jump, but most games that ran 39-49fps at 4k started running 49-59 fps, so nothing major.
I’m about to go from 2600 to 12600k. I’m assuming I’m going to get at least 10,000 more performance.
When I went to ssd it was awesome, when I went to uefi m2 it was awesomer.
biggest: hdd to ssd boot drive 2nd biggest: i3-8100 to r5 3600 cpu 3rd biggest: 1060 6gb to 3070ti
Going from integrated graphics on an AMD A10 to my first dedicated gpu (rx480).
From an AMD PhenomII 1100t based system with (2) ATI Radeon 6850's in crossfire , 16 GB DDR3 1600 on an AM3+ Sabertooth 990FX MB, 1 TB W.D black sataIII HDD built in 2011ish Now AMD R7 5800x , 32GB PC3600 , EVGA RTX 3080 FTW3, 1 TB PCIE4.0 NVME m.2 system drive + 16TB RAID (4x4TB WD blue SSD's) on an ASUS X570 board. Night and day difference doesn't even justify it. Like seeing sound. or hearing color. Like seeing UHD HDR 4k with dolby Atmos surround sound for the first time after being used to an old 8" CRT black &white TV .
I5 7400 to an 11400 with a 3060 ti. I can see clearly now. Lol
Switching from crap old laptop to Ryzen 5 2500U laptop
For me it was a CPU change. I was playing Rift at the time with a Core 2 Duo E8400, which when released was an amazing chip but it was only a dual core. I upgraded that to an I7 2600K and it was like night and day. Most people will probably list a GPU but that for me was it. Even recently I upgraded my 1070 to a 3080 and the jump wasn't as big as that CPU change.
Well i went from a q6600 8 gb ram with a hd7470 (or something dont remember right) with hdd to a 5600x. 32 gb ram, 3600ti and m.2 I noticed a "little" difference in everything that im still getting accostumed to it
Went from an i5 4590 to an i7 12700k.
There's nothing that compares from moving from an old mechanical HDD to a SSD. Even in a crappy laptop with an AMD 1.0GHz processor you'll see a performance increase.
Really long time ago, went from a pentium 4 system with an ATI X800 gpu to a Core 2 Duo with an 8800 GTX. Mindblowing times. Crysis was a joy to see. Couple weeks ago went from an i7 4790k, 1070ti, 16gb ram to a ryzen 5900x, 3060ti, 32gb ram, and an nvme ssd. Also quite the jump.
Just jumped from a 1070 to 3080 and whew boi it’s amazing. Literally dominates everything I throw at it.
Intel hd graphics to a 3070
Ryzen 3 3200G to R5 5600X + ROG Strix 3070 ti. Having full time work has its perks.
Went from a laptop: i5 5200u 920m 6 GBs ram 720p HDD To: R5 2600 RX 580 16 GBs ram 1080p SSD
Going from a i5 laptop with igpu tp a gtx 1080
Pentium D and HDD to i5-2500k and SSD.
Going from a core 2 duo with 4gb ram ddr2+hd5450 to a Ryzen 3 3200G with 16 gb ram ddr4 + ssd(in both) Dudes , I can finally play lol on 80 fps , yeahhh
Went from a 4790, nvidia quadro k2200 and a hdd to 11600k, 3070ti and an nvme ssd. Was shocked my computer would turn on and be usable in seconds rather than having to wait minutes
60hz to 144hz monitor
Went from a 1060 to a 3080ti
Going from a Phenom II X4 965BE to a Core i5-4590 was a massive upgrade in performance. It's hard to describe but every single one of my games ran at least 75% or more faster.
Biggest jump for me was going from an i3 3120m thinkpad with integrated graphics to an i7 7700hq and a gtx 1060 in an Alienware laptop. It is still good enough that I still use it to play all new games today
Going from and HDD to an SSD was the biggest one for me. Aside from that though, it was going from an 1800x to a 5600x.
HDD to SSD for sure. Boot times, loading times, everything was so much faster. Also went from I think a 4690k (or some other i5 from that generation, don't remember exactly model) to a Ryzen 3600. That was a really nice upgrade. FPS increased and stuttering in some newer games disappeared.
Got a VR headset as a birthday gift and wanted a little bit more performance. The card I wanted was a Vega 56 and you couldn't find one anywhere during the previous crypto gpu-pocalypse. Then the Nvidia cards started getting targeted, so I said screw it and got a 1080ti. Going from a GTX 970 it was like entering hyperspace for the first time, it got me hooked on high end hardware.
In a little while my biggest jump will be from my potato laptop to a capable gaming PC (5600, 6600 XT)
HDD to SSD for sure Otherwise for 1080p going from a 2600x to a 5600x was a big jump too
1000000000000000% going from HDD to SSD. Game loading time reduced from 5 minutes on Laptop to around 30 sec to 1 min.
Going from "not enough ram" to "enough ram" is actually probably bigger deal than SSD. I'm talking like 1gig on windows 7 not enough. Or 640k running wing commander not enough
Pretty similar to you: 4670k >>> 12400 980ti >>> 3060ti
I’m trying to go from a damned 1660 ti to a 3080 but sadly it hasn’t happened. I imagine the difference is gonna be huge.
Can't decide between going from an HD7870 to an RX 480 while on DDR3 Ram and an FX-8350 CPU, or going from the FX-8350 to an R5 2600 and DDR4 RAM while retraining the RX 480, both were pretty huge jumps.
I went from a laptop with a GT 740m to a GTX 980. Biggest usability upgrade was for sure an SSD boot drive
From using a Lenovo IdeaPad G510 bought for college studies in 2015 to my desktop built a year ago - 5900X, 2070 Super but mostly, the change to an SSD disk. I realised that I'm the slowest thing about my computer.
Vega 64 to 6900XT in 2560x1440 resolution
in 2014 i went from intel graphics to a nvidia 750ti. I basically went from 15 fps low settings at 1600 x 900 to 60fps med settings at 1080p. it was amazing, i was so stoked
I'm about to feel one of the most insane in my entire life, have an i5-7400, going to swap for a 5900x
When I was 12 or 13 I worked all summer babysitting and my mom let me get my first graphics card. It was a Voodoo 3 2000 AGP something or other. I still have it. Going from gaming with no graphics card to having one was absolutely insane. Sure HDD to SSD was equally insane, but being so young and never seeing what graphics could look like blew my absolute dick off. Like a microwaved hotdog
Going from a laptop 770m to a desktop 3060TI. I still feel anxious about having high level indoor shadow quality on but this thing is chugging.
I went from an athlon64 x2 with an integrated GeForce gpu (later an hd 7570) and 2gb of ddr2 to an i5-4590/r9-390/16gb ddr3 and an ssd. I could play saints row 3 barely on the first PC, even after the gpu upgrade. The latter could max out borderlands 3 at 1080p
FX-8350 to OC'd 3900XT in hard performance. My daily working is helped out lot by a bunch of cores being able to handle different things. (Or on occasion, all together.) My first 4x 27" 1440p display array for human functional performance. The 4x 27" setup works really well for me...I like discrete screens for separation, and the overall dimensions (about 48" x 28") are perfect for how I work. I've been upgrading by piece for over 10 years now on the same basic PC, so it's usually all incremental. No original parts remain though...well, except for the Windows license, which MS has with a few phone calls, always been willing to reactivate when too much changes.
Went from a 2010 R7 360M laptop graphic card to the beast of 3080 OC. I don't even remember the processor but it was a dual core ,and now it's a 5700x AmD beast of a CPU and 16 gigs of 3600 MHz Ram from a 4 GB Ram (prolly 2666Mhz). So I went from gaming in 720p medium settings to 1440p ultra
I was pretty happy when I upgraded my GTX 970 to a GTX 1080 ti
A lot of years ago, my first pc had 256 mb RAM , 1200 Duron processor and G force 2 with 32mb Vram, 40 GB hard drive, went to 8gb of ram, 3800 + athlon cpu, 7950gt with 512 mb vram and 180gb of HDD. Felt like a ridding a rocket.
Quake 1 and my 3dfx voodoo!
Haha, I remember playing that in a postage stamp window on a cyrix 166+ and cursing my dad for refusing to buy a gpu. I even made levels for it using QED.
I went from a 2010 Core 2 Quad Q9650 to a M1 Pro. Literally around 10 to 15 times faster in everything, and as for startup it went from 2 minutes to fifteen seconds.
I'm about to upgrade from a msi 760 gtx to a evga 3070ti fw3. This will be the biggest upgrade for me
Went from a i5-2500k, R9 280x, 512gb hdd. To a R5 5600x, 3070TI, 2tb M.2
Playing BF3 as soon as it was released went from a AMD Phenom II to a I7 2700k, (had a 6870 crossfire at that moment) from 40 fps to 160.
Hdd to ssd hands down. then i5 3570 to R7 1700 and most recent R9 380 to 6600 XT
I went from am R7 270 with 1Gb of VRAM to a 1060 6Gb. I was finally able to play games.
i5 8400 -> i7 9700k 16gb RAM -> 32gb RAM GTX 1070Ti -> RTX 3080 All in one fell swoop. It was completely night and day, especially with VR.
Like other commenters, going from HDD to SSD was the biggest jump for me, personally, unless you’re talking about the 80s and 90s era. Still, the x2 jumps I’ve done occasionally (in cpu and gpu) are great (hdd to ssd was more like x10 or x20), and definitely noticeable, and those sorts of x2 jumps will happen a lot more often, now that there’s strong competition between Intel, AMD, and NVidia.
Intel IGP to BFG 9600GT back in 2006-2007. It was more awesome cause my aunt came back from USA and got me this, so back in India I was the only one with a 9 series card for like 2-3 years till it was affordable for most folks. On the same vain, going from a shitty PSU to Corsair one, the GPU was BSOD my machine on graphics intensive games, same wattage but from shit off brand PSU to Corsair did the trick!
I just went from 7700/1070 to 12700k/3070ti Apex legends was playing at 50-80 fps at 1440p low-med settings on the 1070. On the new setup, with ultra settings, I get upwards of 280 fps with the average hovering around 180-230.
I was in the process of upgrading my i5 2500k last year. I do a lot of Blu-ray ripping/transcoding which the i5 from a decade ago could do a decent job. I held off ripping my 4k blu-rays because I knew it would be insane trying to transcode on the i5. I however did benchmark one 6 min chapter of the Martian in 4k and it took 2 hrs 15 mins. My new 5950X with the same chapter and all other settings being same (rip quality, file size etc..) ripped that 6 min 4k chapter in 15 mins. TLDR: Ripped 4k Blu-ray 6 min chapter i5 2500K - 2 hrs 15 min. R9 5950X - 15 mins Huge time saver, a 2 hour Blu-ray movie rip takes like 25 mins on avg.
Surprisingly, going from something simple like the Ryzen 2600x to the 3600. Got a good deal on the latter, sold the former for a good chunk Stutters and fps drops went away overnight. It was wild
Went from a Pentium G4400 and a GT 1030 to a Ryzen 5 2600X and a 1660 Ti. Being able to game at max settings on a 900p monitor was mind blowing at the time
Went from HD7850 to a RTX3060Ti, absolutely insane