Luxia Le

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If you have a pre-built computer, you might want to upgrade one part without upgrading the whole thing. This feeling isn’t unusual. Many people realize that buying a whole new computer when they only need one part changed isn’t always worth it.

The good news is that you can upgrade a pre-built PC. However, you’ll have to look closely at the internal components before you even think of buying anything new for it. PC manufacturers like HP, Dell, and Lenovo often use proprietary parts for lesser-known components. For instance, they know that users who are more informed will look at the Central Processing Unit and Graphics Processing Unit, but probably won’t pay mind to the brand of Random Access Memory or power supply. So to cut costs, they manufacturer cheap components for tasks that users don’t typically check the specifications for.

This practice is widespread. Unless you buy your computer from a company that aims to sell pre-built computers to high-range, well-informed users, you will probably have some proprietary parts in your computer. This can be good for the consumer since it lowers the price of the computer. However, when it comes to upgrading, it can get a bit dicey.

Proprietary Parts and Upgrading Computers

When using a proprietary part, typically a manufacturer won’t put any more power into it than is strictly necessary. With power supplies, this can lead to some issues. It’s less common than it was in the past, but way back when, if a computer needed 598 watts of power to run, the manufacturer wouldn’t spend the extra money to make a 600 watt power supply. When building or upgrading your own computer, you typically can only buy PSUs in degrees of 50 watts, so, 500, 550, 600, etc. However, independent pre-built manufacturers don’t have to abide by industry standards. They can make a 598 watt power supply if that’s what they need.

This means that you may not be able to upgrade your computer without upgrading your power supply. It might have been necessary if you bought a minimum power PSU for your self-built computer anyway, but if your computer has a 598 watt power supply and needs 598 watts of power, there’s no room to upgrade at all. Even plugging in an extra internal hard drive is going to overdraw that PSU. This can lead to damage to the power supply and lead to a replacement anyway. So, it’s best to save yourself the headache and buy a new power supply when you upgrade a pre-built computer.

You may also run into issues if you want to add RAM to your computer. The motherboard may be proprietary and may not take larger RAM sticks. You may also be limited to the number of RAM sticks you can install (usually two on modern pre-built computers.) This means that if you want, say 64 GB of RAM, you can’t do 16 GB×4, you must do 32 GB×2 to achieve what you want.