I just made one of the strangest ? and best ? upgrades to my PC

There’s always going to be something that’ll come out that’s better than what you’ve currently got, which can make your PC that little bit faster.While we’d all love to constantly upgrade our machines like an ever-evolving RGB-lit Frankenstein’s monster, as we all know, the real world sucks, and there are certain realities that can kill this dream: money and hardware.While upgrading your PC is certainly cheaper than buying or building an entirely new one, it can still be an expensive endeavor, especially when swapping out certain components. I have several SSDs installed, two speedy M.2 PCIe 3.0 drives, one for Windows 11 and intensive apps, and the other for game installs.I also have a larger SATA III SSD for storing files, lighter apps and generally anything that doesn’t need super-speedy file transfer speeds, due to SATA III being a lot slower than PCIe 3.0.This setup has worked pretty well for a while, with Windows 11 loading in a few seconds, and games generally starting up quickly as well.However, as is always the way with PC gaming, there’s a few annoying quirks, and also room for improvement.For some reason, both Steam and the Xbox Game Pass on PC no longer let me install games on the M.2 SSD. Sure, that’s not bad, and it’s much faster than any SATA III drive would be (they top out at around 600MB/s – see why I wouldn’t want to install a game on that?), but it could be faster.Of course, with my current hardware setup, PCIe 4.0 drives are out of the question, unless I upgrade both my CPU and motherboard. But in a large open-world game, the WD_Black AN1500’s faster speeds allowed for faster texture streaming, which led to less pop-in of surfaces and textures when traversing the world.It’s still early days with the drive, but already I’m impressed. I’m looking forward to trying out more games on it, and so far it feels like it’s given my PC a new lease of life.Matt (Twitter) is TechRadar's Senior Computing editor.