1080Ti upgrade - will it choke?

[qbazdz]

Hi All,

been pondering on upgrading my old PC for a bit and wonder if this makes sense.
I've got a 2500K, that O/C nicely to 4.3GHz, had been running under WC for good years now without a skip of a beat.
I have it paired right now with HD7950, again under WC loop and it's been long since I had used this for anything more than photo editing as work/DIY projects/kids had taken me away from any sort of gaming.

I am long overdue to even play Witcher 3 for more than a bit and after a forced upgrade to a 2K screen I'd like to benefit from the visual this game has to offer.

So.. my thinking is, let's get an upgrade of the GPU to something I can easily stick in the WC loop that will take on what I need and will easily cope with what now older kids may be interested in.

Is 2500K going to be a huge bottleneck?

What 'good' version of 1080Ti to look out for?

Cheers,

 

[qbazdz]

I don't water cool my GPU but if you want to place a 1080ti in a wc loop don't you need to either find a 1080ti with a wc block on it or research what wc blocks are still sold for a 1080ti and then which cards they will fit on?

Precisely the point for this thread but yes, ideally would be looking to buy one with a GPU block already.

 

[qbazdz]

I moved from a GTX970 to a 1080Ti in my old 3770k based system. This was because I upgraded to a 1440p monitor. CPU was on decent air cooling running @4.2. The upgrade was well worth it, even with that older CPU and RAM. Witcher 3 was well north of 100fps, even in the heavier areas (hairworks off.)

I eventually upgraded to a 9900k, but for the 6-12 months I was running the 1080Ti with the 3770k I was more than happy.

Both cards (970 & 1080Ti) were MSI Twin Frozr models; nice and quiet, just how I like it, and no need for water cooling.

Thanks for feedback, this puts me at ease a bit, that it would not be a bad upgrade considering what my plans are.

And for sure, if I was struggling with performance I see no issue pushing that CPU a bit further, from memory that unit wasn't amazing but still had more headroom for clocking it a bit further.