This guide will walk you through every possible upgrade path, from cheap second-hand CPUs to SSDs and RAM, while helping you decide if the investment is worth it.

Your old motherboard likely only has SATA II (3 Gb/s), which caps the SSD at about 280 MB/s read speeds (instead of 500+). That is fine. The access time drops from 15ms to 0.1ms. Boot times will fall from 3 minutes to 45 seconds.

Owners of legacy LGA775 desktops (e.g., old Dell OptiPlex, HP Compaq, custom builds circa 2007–2009).