Nvidia offering ‘PC Gaming Revival’ kits to make old hardware fresh again

[Derouiche™]

Upgrading an older system to deliver higher performance in games can be a chore if you’re not used to the process, but Nvidia wants to make the experience a little easier. The company has unveiled what its calling a PC Gaming Revival Kit, and while the hardware is currently only being stocked in Spanish-speaking countries, we suspect this kind of bundle could come stateside relatively easily if Nvidia sees strong uptake.

Kit contents include:

• An MSI GeForce GTX 1060 3GB
• Corsair Force Series LE 240GB SSD
• Corsair CX450M Power supply
•  T-Shirt
• A Gears of War 4 code

According to VideoCardz, which first spotted the kit, the retail price of these components would come to roughly the same price as the bundle, so it’s not currently much of a savings. Then again, comprehensive kits of this sort rarely are. The point is to put together a list of solid components that the consumer can purchase and rely on, not to necessarily offer a significant cost advantage. These sorts of hardware products used to be more common, particularly when CD-ROMs and multimedia capabilities started to debut in consumer hardware. Those of you who were computing back then likely recall the CD-ROM + speakers + SoundBlaster kits that companies like Creative often sold.

As a gaming revival kit, this is pretty solid. SSDs are excellent for improving the performance of older machines, the GTX 1060 3GB is a good GPU for a midrange system (though the 3GB RAM limit is a bit smaller than we’d like), a 450W PSU should drive the rig easily, and you walk away with a game code you can use to test your new hardware. The only sticking point is RAM — systems from several years ago might need a bump in that regard.

Part of what makes this kit work, of course, is how little CPU performance has improved over the last 4-6 years. If you’re still running a 2008 – 2010 Nehalem Core i7, you can pick up significant performance gains from upgrading. Even Sandy Bridge systems, by this point, can look forward to some moderate improvements — but that’s really the threshold as far as significant gains, and even then the results are more likely to be “modestly faster” as opposed to “Holy crap, would you look at that?” If you’d told me in 2006 that plenty of people would still be using CPUs that were pushing a decade, I wouldn’t have believed you. Things could slow down, of course, but that slow?

Well, yes. That slow. And if you live in a Latin American country where this deal is being offered, it’s not a bad one. We’ll see if AMD responds with anything analogous or if Nvidia expands the promotion to a larger group of countries.