His love of PCs and their components was born out of trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the family computer. Tinkering with his own build at age 10 turned into building PCs for friends and family, fostering a passion that would ultimately take shape as a career path.
Besides being the first call for tech support for those close to him, Ty is a computer science student, with his focus being cloud computing and networking. He also competed in semi-pro Counter-Strike for 8 years, making him intimately familiar with everything to do with peripherals.
Upgrading a PC in 2026 means paying more for the parts that used to account for very little in the budget. Memory and flash manufacturers are pushing their capacity towards data centers, and consumer RAM and SSD prices have continued to climb with no end in sight. The silver lining in it all is that as old servers get refreshed, some of that hardware hits eBay and refurb sellers' shelves.
These server pulls were designed for much harder duty than most consumer parts ever see in their lives, and before I spend another cent on anything that's brand-new for my desktop, I'd consider these pre-owned upgrades first.
Enterprise NVMe SSDs
A decent price for protections you can't get elsewhere
Enterprise flash has a usable lifespan, but data centers typically retire it long before they're close to kicking the bucket. Drives like Samsung’s PM983 and PM9A3 or Micron’s 7450 were built to run around the clock, with endurance ratings well beyond consumer drives and power-loss protection that consumer models rarely offer. Their real strength is consistency: they hold sustained write speeds where consumer drives slow down once their SLC cache fills. That doesn’t make them automatically faster for gaming, but for workstation use they're excellent.
Low-queue-depth reads can trail some of the better consumer-grade drives, and many of these enterprise sticks will run hot and idle at a higher power. On my ASUS TUF X870-Plus, only one M.2 slot accepts 22110-length drives, and U.2 models need an M.2-to-U.2 adapter. Whatever you buy, ask the seller for SMART data showing wear and power-on hours.
Enterprise SATA SSDs
A little easier to come by
Older enterprise SATA drives like Intel’s S4510 and S4610 or Micron’s 5300 are the least exciting entry here, and maybe the most practical. They make the same endurance and power-loss protection pitch as their NVMe siblings, just capped by SATA’s bandwidth. They're usually strong price-per-gigabyte contenders as well.
One word of warning: beware of listings that mention SAS drives—they look almost identical to a SATA drive but will not work in your consumer system without the use of an HBA card. You can certainly buy one, but it's not something I'd recommend if you're just looking for a quick storage upgrade.
Intel Optane
A discontinued standard that is underrated
Rather unfortunately, Intel discontinued Optane, so the only way to get one is to buy a pre-owned drive, which is still worth doing. Optane delivers lower latency at low queue depths than NAND flash, which suits the small, scattered type of reads an operating system does all day. The P1600X makes a sensible boot drive, while the 905P comes in larger U.2 and add-in card versions, and despite the Intel badge on both, these work as ordinary NVMe drives on AMD boards. Only the old Optane Memory caching feature depended on Intel’s platform, so you're in the clear on the Red Team.
Don't expect these drives to keep up with modern Gen 4 drives in sequential speed or capacity, though. These are primarily going to improve overall responsiveness, not long transfer speeds.
A second GPU for local AI
Server GPUs can be a great fit here
A dedicated AI inference card would let a model stay loaded while my RTX 5080 handles games, but it's not a one-size-fits-all affair, especially when you're running a newer Blackwell card like I am. The Tesla P40 is one of the most popular server pulls for this job thanks to its 24GB of VRAM, but it’s a rather poor fit for a gaming desktop. It’s passively cooled and needs an aftermarket fan shroud, has no display outputs, and takes an EPS-style power connector. It’s also Pascal-based, and NVIDIA’s 580 driver branch is the last to support Pascal. Since a system runs a single NVIDIA driver, a P40 would pin my 5080 to that branch too, which could be problematic.
The much saner choice would be a Turing-based T4 or RTX A2000 pulled from an OEM workstation. Both are 70W low-profile cards that draw all their power from the slot, and both are still covered by NVIDIA’s current drivers. The trade-off is VRAM: 16GB on the T4, and 6GB or 12GB on the A2000. The T4 is passively cooled like the P40, but at 70W it’s much easier to keep cool in a desktop case, while the A2000 has its own blower fan. On my board, either would go in the chipset-fed x4 slot, which would slow model loading but has little effect on inference as long as the model fits entirely in VRAM.
Network cards
To 10GbE and beyond!
Pulled Mellanox and Intel network cards are quite cheap, and are an easy slot-in solution to improve the network connectivity of your system. With that said, it's not as easy as slotting in a card if the rest of your network is still running on gigabit or 2.5GbE like mine is. Buying the card is one thing, but getting an SFP+ switch and other matching cards for your other devices can drive the cost up quickly. The gains are also questionable, but if you run flash storage in your NAS, it could be worth it.
Server pulls can be an excellent way to upgrade your desktop or server
The memory shortage will ease eventually, and when it does, some of these picks will definitely lose their edge, but others won't. Optane is a good example, because nothing has come along to replace it. Things like NICs, however, are likely to maintain their low prices because there are so many of them, and they have virtually no wear and tear on them, they're just another device looking for a new home.