Get Your Old Rig Gaming Ready on a Tight Budget

Final Thoughts

Price

The Nvidia GTX 960 is a great value for money card, you may have envy of cards such as the Titan X, but as you’ve seen from our benchmarks today, if you’re gaming in 1080p, you can hit that glorious 60FPS for a very modest price. Your old mechanical hard drive doesn’t have to go in the bin either, as it can be used as extra storage for your movies and music, while switching your boot drive to a super-quick SSD for around £50. While the performance gains from new RAM are negligible, it could still be a great upgrade for those coming from budget memory.

• ASUS STRIX GTX 960 2GB – £191.99 UK or $209.99 US
• Crucial 8GB 1600MHz Memory 9-9-9-24 – £59.99 UK or $60.00 US
• Crucial BX100 120GB SSD – £54.98 UK or $67.99 US

All prices correct at time of writing.

Overview

Upgrading your older gaming system is a super easy task. While many people may be worried about tinkering inside their chassis, all the upgrades we applied today are as simple as plug-and-play. Graphics cards can be swapped out in a just a few minutes, RAM simply plugs into the motherboard and while the SSD required a full system re-install, it’s still a user-friendly process that shouldn’t take very long to complete and in terms of system performance, moving from a mechanical drive to an SSD is most certainly worth it.

The GTX 560 Ti is a commendable card, it’s still capable of playing many of today’s latest games at medium settings, with 1920 x 1080 resolution and you’ll be hovering at, or at least close to 60FPS in most games. However, swapping it out for the GTX 960, which you may have overlooked given that it’s just a budget card, had a profound impact on our test rigs gaming performance. It was able to run demanding benchmarks and gaming titles with ultra graphics settings and maintain 60FPS and above; very impressive!

The cost of a new system can be quite expensive, with mid-budget gaming rigs costing anywhere between £500-1000, but for less than £300 (approx $440 US) we’ve shown you that there’s still some life in your old system yet! Sure a dual-core CPU isn’t as fast as many of the newer quad-core chips, but there’s still enough grunt there to get you through your favourite games without issue.

Another welcome bonus of the GTX 960 and an SSD is the reduction in noise and power consumption from your system. SSD’s use a lot less power than older hard drives, while also having no moving parts; say bye-bye to that old “click click” of the hard drive when your using your system! Then there’s the fact that the old GTX 560 Ti required two 6-pin PSU connectors vs the single 6-pin required by the GTX 960. It’s a super efficient card and even benefits from being able to run passive when idle, allowing the card to operate at 0dBa by stopping its fan from spinning!

If you’re on a tighter budget right now, a new GPU, SSD and memory is going to give you the most bang for your buck. You can always start saving up again and purchase a new motherboard and processor in the future, but there’s certainly no need to delay that GPU purchase. I will admit that there’s a good chance your CPU may bottleneck the GPU performance, but coming from an older card, you’re still going to benefit from significant gains and that’s no bad thing. So don’t ditch that old system just yet, it’s still got so much to give!