Gfx upgrade, or new system?

alexkyriak · 9 May 2020 at 14:20

Hi all, I have a 5 year old water cooled system with the following specs:

CPU: Intel i7 4790K at 4.7ghz
MOBO: Gigabyte Z97X-SOC FORCE
RAM: 32GB Team Vulcan Orange 2133Mz
GPU: 2x EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Hydrocopper (SLI)
PSU: Corsair RM1000 1000W PSU
SSD: Samsung 850 PRO 256GB, Samsung 850 EVO 1TB

Question is: I feel like the base system is ok and I should just upgrade the gfx cards to either a 1080ti or dual 1080s in SLI, or is it better just to bite the bullet and invest in a new system?

I don’t feel like I need to get a whole new system, but am not up to speed on current technology at the moment. I don’t need a bleeding edge system, but I know the 980s aren’t holding up too well. I don’t VR yet, am running 4K monitor.

Any opinions guys? Cheers

McGraw · 9 May 2020 at 17:59

I’m in a similar situation but with 1070 and 16gb.

it doesn’t run RDR2 or ACC as well as I’d like but it’s tolerable.

I can’t get any more RAM in and I want 32gb for MSFS.

The 30 series NVidia cards should be out later in the year as should the new AMD CPUs.

I might just go for a 3070 and see if it’s ok until the DDR5 supporting platforms release. If not, will get an 8 core and possibly sell it a year or so later.

My display is 4K60 and I want VR in my next rig’s lifetime.

I consider SLI to be a waste of time and money these days so would never recommend that.

theforce · 10 May 2020 at 00:02

Seems like a nice gaming system, always depending on the types of games you play and if they can benefit from a CPU with more than 4 cores. Those 2 980s would be the first thing l would replace. If you can wait until later this year, both Nvidia and AMD will be releasing new cards. Later down the line, you can replace the motherboard, CPU & ram with a Ryzen 4 or Intel equivalent.

alexkyriak · 10 May 2020 at 09:35

Interesting reading about the state of SLI. I personally found it to be very good indeed, but that was 5 years ago tech. Clearly not so worth it these days, from reading up on going SLI with today’s kit. Although mixed messages on NVLink, bit of an unknown.

It seems I could simply replace the GPU at this stage, with a single card. The CPU is still pretty solid and powerful, and I have decent RAM I think. This would also hopefully reduce the load on the cooling loop. Might use the opportunity to rearrange a couple of radiator fans.

I’m not sure what titles benefit from anything above quad core? I dabble with the odd steam game every now and again, and I quite like sims. I am awaiting the new Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020.

Do I wait until 3080s launch? Is this around August? Are they still on target given the global pandemic? I presume 2080/2080ti will drop in price at that point.

Edit: will I have an issue with my motherboard supporting PCI express x 16, whereas 2080ti cards use PCI 3.0?