Abhinav Raj

There comes a point in every PC's life when it starts to feel slow, and shortly after, annoying to use. My AM4 gaming rig with a Ryzen 5 1600 and an RTX 2070 Super could still run most software and a number of games, but not nearly as well as I'd like it to. Every Windows update, boot sequence, and app launch delay served as a constant reminder that time has passed the PC by. Now, the obvious "fix" would've been to just drop $200 on a new Ryzen 5000-series processor and an NVMe SSD.

The PC hardware market has been in a rather volatile and uncertain place since the beginning of the global memory crisis. Over the past year, DRAM costs, which underpin VRAM pricing, have almost tripled due to a massive, unprecedented demand from the AI industry. Naturally, this change arrived with ripple effects in the consumer market, pushing high-VRAM configurations of the RTX 50-series and Radeon 9000 series well above the intended launch MSRP.

Troubleshooting is the part and parcel of owning a PC, and with modern computers, you just don't know when you'll be made to put that hat on. Maybe you were tinkering with the BIOS to squeeze a little extra performance, or maybe you were just trying to boot into your system on a regular Tuesday. The problem is that more often than not, the problem won't explicitly announce itself or detail the root cause, and you will be made to make educated guesses at every turn.