Should I upgrade?

[Nubins]

Hi all,

I have looked into this myself but I'm really unsure what to do so I'd like some opinions.

I'm basically in a bit of an annoying situation, my basic setup is:

i5 4670k @ 4.2GHZ
R9 290X Crossfire
16GB Corsair Vengeance Pro Blue DDR3 PC3-14900C9 1866MHz

I bought this PC over two years ago and I'm thinking about upgrading, my general concern is, where do I go from here?

I'm really not too keen on having a crossfire setup any longer, the lack of driver support on a lot of titles and general issues with crossfire (flickering etc.) in certain games has really put me off - aside from the fact that they run hotter then the sun and sound like a jet engine taking off when they get up to speed - I feel like I'd like to just move over to a single card setup.

However, I've been looking into it and although direct comparisons to newer cards are hard to come by, it seems that I'm basically going to be side stepping going to a high end current gen card, from my current set up.

Looking at this article:

http://www.babeltechreviews.com/titan-x-vs-290x-crossfire-vs-gtx-980-sli/3/

It seems that my current setup is comparable to a single Titan X - if I'm not mistaken the 1080 is on par with that card - so realistically I'd have to spend £600 to sidestep performance wise, just for the sake of moving over to one card.

I don't know if I'm missing something or this is a no brainer - any thoughts?

EDIT: P.S. Forgot to mention I run 1440p - just in case that question comes up

Thanks

 

[Benjamham]

the 1070 is about the same as the titan x in games, the 1080 is a little bit more. I agree that you would be spending a lot of money to get very small gains at 1440p. One 290x is quite good at 1440p so the option to just run one is there. The main cause of micro/macrostutter with AMD graphics cards, especially in crossfire is when you hit a cpu bottleneck, so you may benefit from buying a 4790k and leaving the rest as-is.

The more expensive option would be to upgrade to a 1080/1070/fury and upgrade to the 4790k

 

[Nubins]

the 1070 is about the same as the titan x in games, the 1080 is a little bit more. I agree that you would be spending a lot of money to get very small gains at 1440p. One 290x is quite good at 1440p so the option to just run one is there. The main cause of micro/macrostutter with AMD graphics cards, especially in crossfire is when you hit a cpu bottleneck, so you may benefit from buying a 4790k and leaving the rest as-is.

The more expensive option would be to upgrade to a 1080/1070/fury and upgrade to the 4790k

Yeah I didn't mention as my post was already a bit long - but I was thinking about upgrading to a 4790k as it's only £300 and should give me a significant boost to performance in general as you say.

I'm thinking maybe just grab a 4790k for now and then hold off on upgrading the card for a bit...might wait for the inevitable 1080TI and then either get that, or a reduced price 1080.

Cheers for the advice