For 4K gaming what do I need to upgrade?

2K4KGamer

2K4KGamer

2K4KGamer

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This is my current rig and I game in ultrawide but I can’t actually play in ultrawide because I stream a lot and its annoying that I have to drop down my res to 2560x1440 16:9 with black borders to be able to stream without the video looking stretched or with borders.... and going 4K with HDR sounds more better than ultrawide. My rig is below apart from a 4K monitor what else do I need to upgrade in order to game in 4K smoothly? Thanks

Monitor: acer predator x34 ultrawide
Cpu: i7 6700k 4.6ghz
Gpu: zotac gtx 980 ti in sli
Mobo: asus maxiums viii hero: rog
Ram: 16gb corsair ddr4 3000mhz xmp
Psu: 1200w corsair platinum

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help me with this!
 
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6/8 core CPU if not using a 1080p/4k capture card as well .

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/avermedia-live-gamer-4k-gc573-pcie-x4-capture-card-cc-003-av.html

nvidia has been working recently with software streaming companies to offload CPU usage when streaming to GPU which should help as well .

key is how well do you want to stream

https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/geforce/news/geforce-rtx-streaming/

for a card over £1k, would push full uk warranty/rma for 4 yrs or over

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/giga...ddr6-pci-express-graphics-card-gx-1a0-gi.html
 
NovaKill4 said:
My basket at Overclockers UK:
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orbitalwalsh said:
6/8 core CPU if not using a 1080p/4k capture card as well .

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/avermedia-live-gamer-4k-gc573-pcie-x4-capture-card-cc-003-av.html

nvidia has been working recently with software streaming companies to offload CPU usage when streaming to GPU which should help as well .

key is how well do you want to stream

https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/geforce/news/geforce-rtx-streaming/

for a card over £1k, would push full uk warranty/rma for 4 yrs or over

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/giga...ddr6-pci-express-graphics-card-gx-1a0-gi.html
Click to expand...

Thanks for the response guys. I was thinking I just need to upgrade the graphics card and thats it. Getting a new cpu with 6 cores+ would require a new motherboard and most likely new ram is that right? If so which cpu and motherboard would be future proof along with the rtx 2080 ti if I get that graphics card. The card and monitor costs and arm and a leg itself lol. But if it’s an investment which will hold me out for at least 4-5 years before I need to upgrade again then that’s great.

Also which company in the UK is best for modifying a pc? If I was to send it off to get upgraded say with the parts I choose.... I’m not really experienced with modifying or building computers. Again, Thanks for the responses!
 
as mentioned above, capture card would help a lot! off loads work from the CPU to the card ! this way all 4 cores are focused on the game . also 4k encoding does hammer a bit!

would allow you to build up fund for the core of your PC at a later date. ryzen 3000 launching after June
 
orbitalwalsh said:
as mentioned above, capture card would help a lot! off loads work from the CPU to the card ! this way all 4 cores are focused on the game . also 4k encoding does hammer a bit!

would allow you to build up fund for the core of your PC at a later date. ryzen 3000 launching after June
Click to expand...

billysielu said:
If you're streaming (presumably at 1080p or less) play in 1080p. Your rig should handle that okay.
Click to expand...

I stream in 1080p because you cant stream in 4K on any platform right now. But I want to play in 4K and HDR so I can stream easily in 1080p without having to downgrade the resolution I play at like I do with having an ultrawide monitor unfortunately. Also if having 4K capture card I can not stream with that capture card as far as I know. Streaming either uses the GPU or CPU. Would having a single 2080 ti card be good enough to play in 4K with and stream in 1080p from? If I bought 2 2080 tis of course I could use one card for streaming and the other for gaming but that’s honestly overkill and 1 2080 ti alone costs a lot.

I don’t have a 4k monitor and that costs £1700-£2100 as well.

How can I upgrade the cpu, mobo and ram? The company that built my pc said the cpu and mobo are not upgradable due to them being the core components of the pc and have compatibility issues. So what’s the solution for that?

EDIT: I don’t have space on my mobo to fit an internal capture card so it will have to be external
 
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@2K4KGamer

elgato (corsair) pro models have Perfect streaming, so can stream live to Youtube/twitch .

https://www.elgato.com/en/gaming/game-capture-hd60-pro

hd60 pro 1080p has h.264 encoder as well

and can be linked to their stream deck which is all the rage at the moment

https://www.elgato.com/en/gaming/stream-deck


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My basket at Overclockers UK:
Total: £268.68 (includes shipping: £8.70)


worth some research , specially if it's off loading from CPU! As you've only got a 4 core CPU.

if your going to do it properly , most use 2nd PC with capture card to CPU and GPU only tasks are Gaming . everything else stream wise is done on the second system
above would be a middle ground, and getting CPU load to solely Gaming

EDIT: I don’t have space on my mobo to fit an internal capture card so it will have to be external
Click to expand...

have an ATX board, plenty of PCIe slots... unless all populated ?


looking , seems to be mixed bag - would force main screen to 1080p it seems​
 
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You could always just use the older graphics card as the dedicated card for doing the encoding "grunt work" then have the 2080 used solely for gaming. (assuming you are not using a capture card of some description to do the capture work) - having not tried this I'm not sure if this would improve the overall experience or cause more problems.


I play at 1440p most of the time with my 2080 and although I haven't tried OBS since my upgrade from a 1060 6GB, but using Nvidia's Shadow Play when set to record the gaming session has minimal impact on my experience even when it is recording at a high setting level. and I am only running an i7 5820K with 16GB Ram.

To give you an example here is a quick sample video I did of Destiny 2 at max settings @ 1440p just after installing the card.

I'll try and do a sample tonight with OBS instead to see how much of impact my system takes while doing the same sort of thing.


Your Motherboard should support the 7th gen cpu's with a bios update if one hasn't been done already, if you are finding the 6700K is struggling (so upgrading shouldn't be too much of an issue - plus if you needed to do a core upgrade you can still use the memory you have in your current system in the new build as it's DDR4.)

As for the monitor you can pick up the LG 27UK600/650/850 for less than £520 (which is HDR) unless you are looking to go with a high refresh rate monitor at 4K which is why I can see the monitor being in that £1.2K+ price range (but then to make full use of that you are going to have a monster system sitting behind it to make use of that additional refresh rate).

Personally I think 1440p is the sweet spot for gaming when it comes to frames vs eye candy. Having looked at a number of different benchmark results and videos on refresh rate vs pixel count my general take away was refresh rate had a bigger impact on the experience than the extra pixels count.
 
orbitalwalsh said:
@2K4KGamer

elgato (corsair) pro models have Perfect streaming, so can stream live to Youtube/twitch .

https://www.elgato.com/en/gaming/game-capture-hd60-pro

hd60 pro 1080p has h.264 encoder as well

and can be linked to their stream deck which is all the rage at the moment

https://www.elgato.com/en/gaming/stream-deck


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My basket at Overclockers UK:
Total: £268.68 (includes shipping: £8.70)


worth some research , specially if it's off loading from CPU! As you've only got a 4 core CPU.

if your going to do it properly , most use 2nd PC with capture card to CPU and GPU only tasks are Gaming . everything else stream wise is done on the second system
above would be a middle ground, and getting CPU load to solely Gaming​
Click to expand...

I don’t have space in my rig to fit an internal capture card. I was looking at this for an alternative: AVerMedia GC553 Live Gamer - which can do 4K 30fps streaming and recording connected via a USB 3.1 port. HDMI in and out. The price seems good too. The internal version can do 4k 60fps streaming. I wish I had space for it.

Building a new pc would cost more than I paid for my current pc which is absurd.

I’m still thinking whether to just buy the above external capture card and get the new rtx 2080 ti card + a 4k monitor and then prolong my due upgrade for a full upgrade for the cpu, motherboard, ram, sound card and maybe a faster HDD although the HDD is not really needed.

Option 1: external cap card (£180) + rtx 2080 ti (£1100) + 4k monitor (£1760) = £3040

Option 2: Full pc upgrade, cpu, mobo etc which would end up costing over £5000+ I’m sure of it lol.
 
keep everything else in your system bar the cpu/mobo - ram is 3000hz and will work nicely with ryzen


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My basket at Overclockers UK:
Total: £1,535.03 (includes shipping: £11.10)
​

use OBD for streaming. You've got 8cores/16 threads

£500 28" 4k g-sync screen

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/acer...descreen-led-monitor-black-red-mo-097-ac.html

£2k all in ! stream nicely! overclock CPU manually .

sure aorus give XSpilt with year free membership- cant remember
 
davetherave2 said:
You could always just use the older graphics card as the dedicated card for doing the encoding "grunt work" then have the 2080 used solely for gaming. (assuming you are not using a capture card of some description to do the capture work) - having not tried this I'm not sure if this would improve the overall experience or cause more problems.


I play at 1440p most of the time with my 2080 and although I haven't tried OBS since my upgrade from a 1060 6GB, but using Nvidia's Shadow Play when set to record the gaming session has minimal impact on my experience even when it is recording at a high setting level. and I am only running an i7 5820K with 16GB Ram.

To give you an example here is a quick sample video I did of Destiny 2 at max settings @ 1440p just after installing the card.

I'll try and do a sample tonight with OBS instead to see how much of impact my system takes while doing the same sort of thing.


Your Motherboard should support the 7th gen cpu's with a bios update if one hasn't been done already, if you are finding the 6700K is struggling (so upgrading shouldn't be too much of an issue - plus if you needed to do a core upgrade you can still use the memory you have in your current system in the new build as it's DDR4.)

As for the monitor you can pick up the LG 27UK600/650/850 for less than £520 (which is HDR) unless you are looking to go with a high refresh rate monitor at 4K which is why I can see the monitor being in that £1.2K+ price range (but then to make full use of that you are going to have a monster system sitting behind it to make use of that additional refresh rate).

Personally I think 1440p is the sweet spot for gaming when it comes to frames vs eye candy. Having looked at a number of different benchmark results and videos on refresh rate vs pixel count my general take away was refresh rate had a bigger impact on the experience than the extra pixels count.
Click to expand...

Thanks for your reply! The reason why I went with ultrawide gaming back in 2016 was because it is indeed the middle ground or sweet spot for gaming. But as I do stream a lot on twitch, I find myself constantly downgrading my res to 2560x1440 to be able to stream in the 16:9 ratio and so the video does not look stretched or with borders.

I want to finally upgrade to 4K HDR gaming for the pc and I’ll keep my ultrawide monitor as its good for the extra space on screen to do work etc.

Not sure if I should do a partial upgrade or think about a new pc upgrade as I can not get a 6-8+ core cpu on my current mobo.
 
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orbitalwalsh said:
keep everything else in your system bar the cpu/mobo - ram is 3000hz and will work nicely with ryzen


BB CODE
My basket at Overclockers UK:
Total: £1,535.03 (includes shipping: £11.10)
​

use OBD for streaming. You've got 8cores/16 threads

£500 28" 4k g-sync screen

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/acer...descreen-led-monitor-black-red-mo-097-ac.html

£2k all in ! stream nicely! overclock CPU manually .

sure aorus give XSpilt with year free membership- cant remember
Click to expand...

I have never had an AMD cpu, not sure what I should expect from it. Lets say I chose those parts and upgraded, who can I get to do this upgrade for me? Since I don’t really know how to build a pc and check that things are working in correct order, do the optimal tweaking etc.

As for the monitor, I have my eyes on the eye watering acer predator x27 which sells for about £1760.
 
heads up with small 27" 4k monitors .

if your able to try a 4k one... get someone to swap between 4k and 1440p res multiple times, not tell you and see if you can guess which one is which with no text overlay. focus on the detail , might be able to see more but detail gets lots. pixels are too close , why text appears so small and have to scale it up. some people down mind it .

is a nice screen just wondering why it was 27" ... now the new 43" big screens rolling in.... wow !!! 4k and 120hz HDR 1000 ... eeeep

with parts. was going by yourself doing it

full system- built by ocuk... looking at £2k

My basket at Overclockers UK:
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    • Solid State Drive (Primary):TeamGroup 480GB L5 Lite SSD 2.5" SATA 6Gbps 3D NAND Solid State Drive
    • Solid State Drive (Secondary):Unwanted
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Total: £2,169.05 (includes shipping: £14.10)​
​

then your screen ... another way of doing things is 32" 1440 144hz screen and ingame upscaling to 4k ?
 
orbitalwalsh said:
heads up with small 27" 4k monitors .

if your able to try a 4k one... get someone to swap between 4k and 1440p res multiple times, not tell you and see if you can guess which one is which with no text overlay. focus on the detail , might be able to see more but detail gets lots. pixels are too close , why text appears so small and have to scale it up. some people down mind it .

is a nice screen just wondering why it was 27" ... now the new 43" big screens rolling in.... wow !!! 4k and 120hz HDR 1000 ... eeeep

with parts. was going by yourself doing it

full system- built by ocuk... looking at £2k

My basket at Overclockers UK:
  • 1 x OcUK Gaming Sabre Overclocked Gaming PC - AMD Ryzen 2600 @ 3.8GHz = £2,154.95
    • Solid State Drive (Primary):TeamGroup 480GB L5 Lite SSD 2.5" SATA 6Gbps 3D NAND Solid State Drive
    • Solid State Drive (Secondary):Unwanted
    • Storage Drive:Seagate BarraCuda 1TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache HDD - *System Stock*
    • WIFI:Unwanted
    • Operating System:Microsoft Windows 10 Home Advanced - Systems
    • Security Software:Unwanted
    • Processor:AMD Ryzen 7 2700X Eight Core/Sixteen Thread 4.35GHz Processor (MPK)
    • Memory:Team Group Vulcan T-Force 8GB (2x4GB) DDR4 PC4-24000C16 3000MHz Dual Channel Kit - Grey (TLGD48G3000
    • Graphics Card:palit GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Gaming Pro OC 11264MB GDDR6 PCI-Express Graphics Card
    • Case:phanteks Eclipse P350X Glass Digital RGB Midi Tower Case - Black
Total: £2,169.05 (includes shipping: £14.10)
​

then your screen ... another way of doing things is 32" 1440 144hz screen and ingame upscaling to 4k ?
Click to expand...

Unfortunately I don’t know anyone who has a 4K display lol. I didn’t know OCUK build for you as well. That setup + 1760 monitor seems an ok price. But I would bump the ram up if it helps. I will try to create a build on here quick and see what the price comes up to. I mean if this rig would be for gaming and streaming on whilst I use my current pc as a second pc, that would be good but this all together would take up a lot of space lol. If it would cost me £3060 to do a partial upgrade, I may as well just build a new pc that will last me 4-5 years before thinking about upgrading again.

My current pc lasted me not even 3 years having now upgrading again technically. Which is not a good thing but if I decide on building a new pc I for sure will have it last 4-5 years maxing most games in 4K before upgrading again lol. Otherwise value goes out the window.
 
Depends on what you were using your PC for 3 years ago . Streaming has taken off but most were capturing gameplay and loading onto YouTube .
Streaming has taken off quickly . I personally prefer edited videos on YouTube as I like to watch polished content or guides etc .
Ryzen 1700 showed the way forward for streaming with its core count , or capture cards for dual set up . Heck
You can build a cheap second rig with capture card to stream the main rig .
Different routes and solutions
 
orbitalwalsh said:
Depends on what you were using your PC for 3 years ago . Streaming has taken off but most were capturing gameplay and loading onto YouTube .
Streaming has taken off quickly . I personally prefer edited videos on YouTube as I like to watch polished content or guides etc .
Ryzen 1700 showed the way forward for streaming with its core count , or capture cards for dual set up . Heck
You can build a cheap second rig with capture card to stream the main rig .
Different routes and solutions
Click to expand...

So I may just invest in a full new pc. But I want to go with Intel for the cpu. Which i9 is best for gaming and video editing/rendering? I will go with an rtx 2080 ti for the gpu and I will go beastly with 3 HDD, 32GB RAM etc. I will most likely spend an arm and a leg on this rig but I may as well if I was planning to spend £3060 just on a monitor and gpu lol.

Currently searching what’s the best i9 cpu for gaming and being a workstation.
 
Two pre-builds, former not 32GB bit would have to ask the. To make it 32gb

My basket at Overclockers UK:
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    • Motherboard:Gigabyte Z390 Gaming SLI Intel Z390 (Socket 1151) DDR4 ATX Motherboard
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Total: £5,132.92 (includes shipping: £23.10)


Vs self build .. but could save cash reusing parts etc

My basket at Overclockers UK:
Total: £2,440.81 (includes shipping: £14.10)​
​

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