Playing Online PC Games with the Right Equipment

One thing that is always hard for those that love online gaming but don’t have a budget for decent equipment to run their games is performance. When I say performance, I am talking about both player performance as well as PC performance. However, there are ways to make sure that you get high-performance equipment at low-costs.

Personally, being a Call of Duty player, I know all about having bad equipment. I used to think it was my internet connection that was causing lag until I played at my friend’s house with a superfast fiber connection. I was playing on my Apple computer using a windows VM, so I never in a million years would have thought my laptop was the problem.

The lag I was experiencing did not change too much at all on the high-speed connection. On the other hand, my friend was playing with no lag and fully enhanced graphics settings on his PC. I soon realized there was more to my problem than the internet connection. This also meant that maybe my PC at home was also having problems with thrashing or some bottleneck being caused by the hardware.

Now my home PC was not a surprise as I have never really upgraded it because I only ever use it to download movies, music, or play a couple of games. For the most part, I do everything on my laptop. But, for the sake of giving my laptop a rest, I like to play on my PC.

I don’t often go out and play computer games, so my plan was not to upgrade my laptop, but my PC. I needed a simple solution though because I cannot justify pending thousands on a new PC or upgrades for my current PC. This meant looking for the best equipment I could find at the lowest prices.

My major real issues were hardware:

• Processor thrashing out 95% to 100%
• Only showing 100 Mb of RAM Free
• Not having crisp graphics

1. E-Bay – Graphics Card

My goal was to play games such as Combat Arms, Call of Duty, Overwatch, and Dota all at high graphic intensity with zero lag. Step 1 was a new graphics card. I did my research and realised that a decent graphics card was not going to be cheap. But, in the end I picked up a top of the range graphics Nvidia graphics card with 4Gb for just $90 second hand. No catch either. It arrived in good condition – maybe a little dusty, but this card was going for $400 new so it was a steal.

My problem was instantly solved with my lag and I could ramp up the graphics, but even on full I still had slight lag.

2. Computer Fair – More RAM

I only had 4Gb of RAM in my PC. How old school am I. Luckily a friend of mine was going to a computer fair and my goal was 16Gb of RAM. Now I am not overly into computer technology myself, so the fair did not interest me overly. However, if you are into this kind of thing, you have a day out lined up and at the same time you can pick up some bargain deals at these computer fairs. My friend came back with x2 8 Gb sticks at just $15 each. Pretty amazing as for $30, my PC was now able to handle even more power.

3. New Processor – Amazon

 To be honest, I could have just gone to Ebay for this, but it just so happens Amazon had the best deal to upgrade my processor according to the motherboard that I had. Honestly, I needed a little help from friend here as I am not overly clued up on which processors fit which sockets or a re compatible with which motherboards.

In fact, there was a discussion on whether I should buy a new motherboard simply because of something called bus speed, but my friend in the end said this was a decent mother board already with a crappy processor.

Anyways – a new Intel Core i5 superfast processor set me back a low and budget $78.

My Overall Gaming Performance

I can play any game on full graphics with zero lag. I have my task manager open on my windows showing performance. I never see continuous 95% to 100% processor spikes. I always see plenty of RAM available too. Both were my main issues and were completely solved. Plus, with the new graphics cards, the graphics and gaming experience much better.

Now I think I am addicted to upgrading my PC. I am thinking about duel processors on a new superfast nus speed motherboard with a brand new super hertz monitor. And I am someone that knows almost nothing about computer hardware, but for sure I am see the benefits in my gaming.

• Faster reaction times
• No more points lost, or games lost due to hardware
• Peak performance throughout all games I play
• An overall better feel for the game simply because of better graphics

In the end, you have to look at how much I spent to turn my dog of a PC into what is close to a super gaming spec machine with not much money at all. Now it may not look the part, but when it comes to gaming, it is the part so who cares.

• $90 NVIDIA graphics card
• $30 RAM 16Gb
• $78 Processor i5 Pentium

The only piece of equipment that may not be exactly gaming spec was the processor, but for the price it stopped the problem I was having with my processor throttling all the time, which was the ultimate aim. The graphics card did the most work for me and then the RAM just ensured that I was not always low on RAM for whatever reason that may have been. $198 later and my gaming is 50 times better than it was.