The steps that follow will take you through some basic tips and recommendations for optimizing your PC for gaming so that you can get the most out of the hardware and get your games running smoothly again. It is useful for both those that have an aging PC that just meets the minimum requirements as well as those that have the latest and greatest graphics card, CPU, SSD and more. If you built your own gaming PC or at least selected the hardware installed then you probably know exactly what your PC is running, but if you are like many and bought an off the shelf gaming PC you may not know the exact hardware configuration. Windows provides various methods for seeing what hardware is installed and recognized by the operating system, but it is rather clunky and not straight forward. Luckily there are a few applications and websites that can help you determine this fairly quickly. Belarc Advisor is a small Windows and Mac application that can be installed and run in under five minutes. It provides a wealth of information about both the hardware and operating system installed on your PC including the CPU, RAM, graphics cards, HDD and much more. This information can then be used to compare against a game’s published system requirements to determine if your PC is capable of running it. CanYouRunIt by System Requirements Lab provides a simple one-click solution to determining if your PC can run a particular game. While there’s really more than one click required due to a small application installation, it is rather easy to use. CanYouRunIt analyzes your PC hardware and operating system comparing it to the selected game’s system requirements and provides a rating for each requirement. Optimizing your graphics card frame rate is also a good avenue to pursue when looking for performance increases. There are a number of third-party applications that allow for the tweaking of graphics card settings and overclocking for performance boosts. These include MSI Afterburner which allows you to overclock any GPU, EGA Precision X, and Gigabyte OC Guru to name a few. In addition, there are utility programs such as GPU-Z which provides details hardware specifications and settings of your graphics card and Fraps which is a graphics utility that provides frame rate information.
Kill Unnecessary Processes in Windows Task Manager
One of the quickest ways to boost your PC’s performance is to clean all of the startup programs and processes that you find unnecessary to have running whenever your PC is on. The Windows Task Manager is the first place to start and is where you can find out what is running and taking up valuable CPU and RAM resources. The Task Manager can be started a number of ways, the easiest of which is by right-clicking on the Task Bar and selecting Start Task Manager. Once opened navigate to the Processes tab, which shows you all of the underlying programs and background processes that are currently running on your PC. The number of processes is mostly irrelevant as most of them have a fairly small memory and CPU footprint. Sorting by CPU and Memory will show you those applications/processes that are taking up your resources. If you’re looking to get a boost right away, ending the process from within the Task Manager will clear up CPU and Memory but it does nothing to prevent those background tasks from starting up again on your next restart.
Cleanup Startup Programs
To prevent programs and processes from starting up every time you restart your PC requires some changes to the System Configuration. Press the Windows Key + R Key to pull up the Run Command window and from there enter msconfig and click OK to pull up the System Configuration window. From here click on the Services Tab to see all of the programs and services that can be set to run when Windows starts. Now if you want to stop every third-party application/process from running at startup simply click on the Hide all Microsoft services and then click Disable All, it’s as simple as that. If you’re like many of us, though, there are programs that you’ll want to keep running in the background so it’s better to go through each listing and disable manually. Once you have completed a reboot is required for the changes to take effect.
Applications to Free up System Resources for Gaming
If you prefer to leave the startup programs and processes as they are then other options to boost your PC’s performance which include the use of third-party applications. Below briefly summarizes some of these applications and what they do:
CCleaner — CCleaner is an application that takes the mystery out of registry clean up, allowing users to easily clean up orphaned Windows registry keys & entries leftover from uninstalled applications. It also cleans up many different types of temporary files, memory dumps and more that can all contribute to slowing down a PC. Razer Game Booster — If you don’t want to make changes to your startup configuration Game Booster from Razer is the tool for you. It helps you manage your computer’s resources, allowing you to configure and optimize your PC settings based on the games you play so they run at optimal performance. It also includes extra features such as a screenshot capture, HDD defrag and frame rates. MSI Afterburner — MSI Afterburner is a graphics card overclocking utility which is completely free to download and run and can be used with any kind of graphics card. Overclocking can be a tricky undertaking but Afterburner presents it in a simple and intuitive format. Spybot, Malware Bytes or other Anti-Malware Program — Malware is one of the most common problems in degrading PC performance. Running regular scans using an Anti-Malware application such as Spybot or Malwarebytes will go a long way in keeping your PC humming along.
These are only a handful of the best-known and well-regarded applications that will help boost the performance of your PC both for gaming and overall use. Disk fragmentation happens through the general use of your PC. This includes install/uninstall of applications, saving documents and even surfing the Web. With traditional hard disk drives, data is stored on physical discs that spin, over time data gets scattered across the disk platters which can make for longer disk read times. Defragging your HDD re-organizes the internal data on the disk platters, moving it closer together and thus decreasing read times. There are a number of third-party applications such as Defraggler and Auslogics Disk Defrag but the basic Windows disk defragmenter tool is really all you need. To access the Windows Disk Defragmenter, click on the start menu and enter “defrag” in the search bar. From the window that opens you can either analyze or begin the defragging.
Upgrade Your Hard Drive to a Solid-State Drive
Solid-state drives have come down in price considerably over the past couple years making them affordable for more people. For games installed on an SSD will see an immediate boost in startup and load times. The one drawback is that if your OS/Primary drive is a traditional HDD, then you may see some bottleneck with the operating system still.
Upgrade Your Graphics Card or Add Multi-Graphics Card Setup
Upgrading your PC’s graphics card will help in the rendering and animation of graphics and allow for smooth movements, high frame rate, and high-resolution graphics. If you have a motherboard with multiple PC-Express slots then you can add multiple graphics cards using either Nvidia SLI or AMD Crossfire. Adding a second or even third or fourth graphics card will boost performance, the cards must be identical and depending on how old the card is you may get diminishing returns. That is multiple “older” graphics cards may still be slower than a newer single graphics card.
Add or Upgrade RAM
If you have available RAM slots, installing new DIMMS will help eliminate stuttering during gameplay. This occurs when your RAM just meets or is a little below the minimum recommended requirements for RAM since the game and background processes that are required will be competing for the same resources. Increasing the speed of your RAM is also another way to boost performance. This can be done by purchasing new, faster RAM or by overclocking. However, one caveat with faster RAM - it is better to have slower RAM than less fast RAM. That is if your games stutter with 4GB of slower RAM they will still stutter with 4GB of faster RAM, so upgrading to 8GB of slower RAM would stop the stuttering.
