Is it Time? Skylake-X & 1080Ti

[Arthalen]

PC has been going for what feels like Donkey's years - my 1080 Ti card has been great value for the £650 I paid brand new.

• Intel i7 7820X Skylake-X (Stock speeds)
• Asus Prime X299-Deluxe & Corsair 64GB DDR4
• Geforce 1080 Ti & Asus ROG PG279 2K-Gsync
• Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB M2 SSD

My mainstay game has been Destiny 2 for a number of years, and the rig is absolutely fine cracking away at 100FPS+ at my 2K Screen res with Gsync. Processor/Memory/SSD are great and do all the VMware virtualisation that I do for work.

However, there's a couple of games recently that have started to show its age. Jedi:Survivor and Starfield to name a pair, and I have an eye on playing Elden Ring, Cyberpunk 2077, Space Marine 2, Dune: Awakening and the FFVII Remake games when I get round to them/when they get released.

I'd also like to start playing at 4K and 60FPS and above.

Sooooo, do I need to gut and replace this aging workhorse from the ground up? Could I get away with a Video Card upgrade? What would people recommend?

 

[Tetras]

It looks like your single core performance is somewhere between a Ryzen 2600X/3600X and it is generally assumed that if you buy a card any faster than a 4070, you're going to hit a bottleneck there.

Since you'd like to start playing at 4K, I'd be inclined to just get the graphics card anyway and see how it goes. Something like a 7900 GRE.

 

[Armageus]

I'd second @Tetras, and just recommend dropping in a faster graphics cards (of which there are quite a few options either new or used that will be faster than a 1080Ti) - 7900GRE would be ideal.


It's probably also worth seeing if you can get a small overclock on your 7820X - you've already got a decent motherboard for doing it, and although you can get other CPUs that will drop into that board e.g. 9900X or 10920X, unless you need extra cores, they don't offer much of a single core performance boost.

 

[throwaway4372]

My take on this question comes down to money. I don't think triple-A gaming at 4K is ever worth doing, but maybe you're a gucci belt wearer who doesn't mind. Do you have a budget in mind for a whole new pc?

I'm running a 6700K and GTX 1080, cpu is about equal to yours, gpu a bit weaker. I'd say it's the cpu that shows its age more than the gpu. So I'd say plan a whole new PC, it's just a question of what's the right thing to buy.

 

[Armageus]

I'm running a 6700K and GTX 1080, cpu is about equal to yours, gpu a bit weaker. I'd say it's the cpu that shows its age more than the gpu. So I'd say plan a whole new PC, it's just a question of what's the right thing to buy.

7820X is at least an 8 core / 16 thread part, so will have a bit more longevity compared to your 6700K, particularly in newer games that use more than the historic 4 main threads that we were stuck with for a while.

 

[Arthalen]

My take on this question comes down to money. I don't think triple-A gaming at 4K is ever worth doing, but maybe you're a gucci belt wearer who doesn't mind. Do you have a budget in mind for a whole new pc?

I'm running a 6700K and GTX 1080, cpu is about equal to yours, gpu a bit weaker. I'd say it's the cpu that shows its age more than the gpu. So I'd say plan a whole new PC, it's just a question of what's the right thing to buy.

Great question.

If I was to buy a new PC, I'd throw the kitchen sink at it as I did with my 7820X/1080Ti setup and would wait for finances to allow me to do it (likely middle of 2025). I wouldn't have a problem with dropping 2-3K on a new PC base unit if it meant that I could run that PC for 7-8 years again.

However, if we're in the realm of a new GPU and Monitor only, that's something I could entertain much sooner instead, picking up a new GPU one month and then the monitor the next. This would likely keep me in the Nvidia camp though so I can continue using my Gsync monitor for now.

 

[tamzzy]

7820X is at least an 8 core / 16 thread part, so will have a bit more longevity compared to your 6700K, particularly in newer games that use more than the historic 4 main threads that we were stuck with for a while.

i think it also depends, the 7820 doesn't have a lot of raw singlethreaded speed (skylake core @ 4.5ghz) so this would play a factor in some games

Great question.

If I was to buy a new PC, I'd throw the kitchen sink at it as I did with my 7820X/1080Ti setup and would wait for finances to allow me to do it (likely middle of 2025). I wouldn't have a problem with dropping 2-3K on a new PC base unit if it meant that I could run that PC for 7-8 years again.

However, if we're in the realm of a new GPU and Monitor only, that's something I could entertain much sooner instead, picking up a new GPU one month and then the monitor the next. This would likely keep me in the Nvidia camp though so I can continue using my Gsync monitor for now.

£2.5k or thereabouts will get you a 7800x3d + 4090

if you want to do it in piecemeal then get a 4070 or 4070 super
that would leave you with the least % drop/depreciation when you come to sell your current rig for the full upgrade

 

[jigger]

The system might be enough to push an RDNA card to 60fps. For 4K and greater resolutions, you’re looking at pretty highend cards with a lot of VRAM especially because of the PCIE gen 3 limitation.

I would avoid running any Nvidia card with this system because of the reasons above and CPU overhead Nvidia cards suffer.

I’d also keep in mind the increased power use of the latest video cards. It’s no longer a trivial matter fitting a card. The power requirements and heat output is considerable.