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?

 

[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.