I've been thinking a lot this morning about my budget gaming PC. While I have a good enough PC for now, over time I'll be wanting to upgrade things one part at a time. I decided to throw a list together of upgrades that make sense from budget gaming perspective in order of things that I'll most likely upgrade first.
RAM
While my current PC has 8GB of RAM which is enough for now, upgrading to 16GB of RAM is not only easy but a fairly cheap upgrade only costing around $20-$25 for a couple 4GB sticks. Installation would be a breeze and would only take maybe a minute. More modern titles like Final Fantasy 15 recommend 16GB of RAM so upgrading to 16GB makes sense. It also has the added benefit of me being able to sell my motherboard, CPU, and RAM as a combo for a bit more down the road when it comes time to upgrade those. I'll be looking to upgrade my RAM sometime within the next few months.
Case
Working in a case as small as mine proved to have it's challenges. It has a benefit of being a sleeper case and many sleeper builders enjoy using cases like this because while they look unassuming, it can be used with any mATX motherboard as well as a standard ATX PSU. These cases tend to sell for around as much as cheaper gaming cases on eBay. While I won't need a top of the line case, having a case with good airflow, cable management, and a side window would be awesome. I'd like to upgrade my case sometime next year.
HDD/SSD
Next on the list is upgrading either to a bigger HDD or getting a bigger HDD and an SSD. SSDs would be most people's first upgrade choice here, but speed wise, my HDD doesn't do too bad. My HDD is currently full and newer games are only getting bigger. Ideally, I'd love to have a 2TB HDD and a 240GB SSD as my boot drive. I'll probably be looking to upgrade to those sometime late next year.
Motherboard, CPU, and RAM
I already listed RAM before, but usually when you upgrade your motherboard, you also have to upgrade your CPU and RAM as well to work with whatever motherboard you have. I'll be honest, I don't really like my current motherboard. It's a pain to work with and only has 1 SATA 6 connector and hooking my HDD up to any of the others is painfully slow. Upgrading to a motherboard with 2 of them will be just what I need. I'll probably wait a year or two and buy a Ryzen compatible motherboard, CPU, and RAM as a combo from eBay once the prices of those drop a bit. This will be the single most expensive upgrade which is why it'll be happening much later than many of the others.
PSU
While I love my current 550W Corsair PSU, it's a budget model. It has the benefit of being semi-modular, but as far as power supplies go, it's not the greatest. Even when it was released around 4-5 years ago, it was only ever intended to be a budget PSU. I'd probably want to upgrade to an 850W semi-modular bronze PSU at that time.
GPU
Last on the list is the GPU. My GPU was the current biggest expensive of my build other than the whole PC itself. It's totally fine for 1080p gaming at the moment and I really shouldn't need to upgrade it for a couple years at least. When it does come time to upgrade it though, I'll probably be looking to upgrade it to a GPU that supports ray tracing. While ray tracing is still fairly new, even the newest Xbox which is coming out next year will have ray tracing and has been one of the single biggest improvements in gaming that's ever happened. Ray tracing GPUs are a bit pricey now, but in a couple years, I should be able to find some used ones on eBay for a decent price.
That's it for now. As always, I hope you have an awesome day!