The topic These 4 PC maintenance tasks cost $0, but improve your performance drastically is currently the subject of lively discussion — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
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If you look hard enough, you’ll start to notice a strange parallel between the way we age and the way our PCs do. Both require regular maintenance to function at their best, both benefit from consistent upkeep over sudden intervention, and both have a tendency to accumulate clutter that turns into something harder to ignore over time. If you neglect either long enough, the performance degradation becomes difficult to reverse.
An aging system shows many signs. Perhaps in the form of sluggish boot times, slower than usual applications, and a general sense that hardware is pushing itself harder than it should be. But not all of these symptoms necessarily point to failing components or an overdue upgrade. Here are five tasks that cost nothing and have kept my rig performing well above its age.
One of the best ways to know if your system is performing as it should is to routinely measure it against itself. Without a baseline, gradual performance degradation is hard to detect.
For GPU benchmarking, I use 3DMark’s Speed Way and Steel Nomad tests as I’ve found them to be reliable and granular. As it offers a standardized score that is directly compared against a database of similar hardware configurations globally, it’s a great way to measure any changes to your PC’s performance. Running a CPU profile test alongside the GPU test also helps round out the picture. Together, these benchmarks surface issues such as thermal throttling and suboptimal performance. Inferring from this data, it makes it easy to diagnose issues like a misconfigured fan profile, a malfunctioning cooling system, or a dried out thermal interface material.
3DMark is a popular benchmarking utility that includes a collection of benchmarks to test your GPU’s performance with various settings. The free version of the program is enough to run some basic tests, while the paid version unlocks additional tests to collect more information.
A lot of your PC experiences is predicated on how well your storage device is operating, and the sheer impact of a firmware update on that was something that I underestimated severely until I updated the firmware on my Crucial NVMe. Not only did my average game load times drop by 25% on average, my CPU’s idle temperature also fell by a full 5°C without any other changes to the system.
The temperature drop was completely unexpected, and had me scratching my head for a little while. I discovered later that, since NVMe drives have a direct influence on processor I/O operations, an updated firmware improves how the drive manages power states and handles data requests. This leads to a reduction in the background polling the CPU has to perform, in turn, leading to less overhead. For a simple task that took me less than five minutes, the returns were nothing short of absolutely game-changing, and it is indeed unfortunate that most users aren’t aware of the benefits of this simple maintenance task.
It may not be time to throw out your PC yet! Here are 10 things you can do to improve the performance of your aging gaming PC
CPU heatsinks and AIO radiators accumulate dust because of the nature of the job they do, and even a month of regular use can produce enough buildup to meaningfully impact cooling efficiency. This buildup determines your thermal ceiling, regardless of how capable or power-efficient your chip is, and the problem worsens in summer when ambient temperatures are already working against you.
A hand vacuum or air blower is all it takes to address this issue, and it makes it super easy to clean up your radiators frequently. If you run it through the fins of the radiator or heatsink periodically, the airflow restriction clears immediately.
Always hold the cooling fans in place before blowing air through them, if you’re keeping them screwed in. Allowing them to spin freely from forced air can potentially damage the bearings.
Most users will only ever venture into their BIOS during the initial setup, and then proceed to ignore the menu altogether for the rest of the system’s life. This often means that they are leaving two of the most impactful configuration options entirely untouched, and surprisingly enough, you can rely on the fan curve optimization and voltage frequency curve to be wrong almost one-hundred-percent of the time with the default settings. The default fan curves are too conservative, and the V/F curves are rather aggressively tuned.
Spending a few minutes setting a custom curve that’s attuned to your workload and the thermal profile of your CPU is one of the best ways to get the sweet spot between performance and efficiency. Getting the fan curve right means your system receives adequate cooling throughout usage, whereas undervolting a chip that’s prone to thermal throttling will reduce the voltage that’s supplied at a given frequency, letting you enjoy the same performance throughput at a lower temperature.
The irresistible instinct to pop open a tab on Amazon for a hardware update, especially when your system starts showing its age, is quite understandable. That’s probably an itch that’s almost a certain characteristic of desktop PC owners. However, it rarely ever is the first move worth making. A tuned BIOS, clean cooling hardware, updated storage firmware and a reliable benchmarking baseline address the most common sources of degraded performance, and it does so without needing you to spend another penny.