Spec a New Build or upgrade ?

Helfire

Helfire

Helfire

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Joined
16 Oct 2006
Posts
51
I’m looking to upgrade my 4-year-old system as its starting to show its age and upgrade options. It’s used mainly for work and some play. For work mainly lightroom/photoshop/and some video editing/streaming/Office also testing VMs occasionally. While for games some shooters COD/ RPS/ NMS. All in 4k. Currently my 2 x monitors only do 60Hz, but these can be upgraded later on. Mainly looking initial to keep the GTX 2070 and upgrade once the prices settle some for ether an Nvidia 40 series or AMD 79 series so ideally a system that compatible with both. Only other add-in card I use is a duel 10GB ethernet card to connect to my 10G NAS.

Memory wise minimum 32GB, very fast OS and Cache drives. A case that’s not bigger than I have, a bit smaller would be nice. Not really interested in LED as I can’t see the side.

Open to both Intel/AMD and not really wanting to overclock or have full water cooling.

Budget wise for the upgrade/new build is around £2000 (Can claim the tax back as its for for work).



This is my current setup and happy to reuse or just sell on.

AMD Ryzen 7 2700X with a be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 4 CPU Cooler

ASRock X470 Taichi

Team Group Dark Pro 8Pack Edition 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 PC4-28800C16 3600MHz Dual Channel Kit – Black (x 2 32GB total)

GIGABYTE NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER OC 8192MB

Antec HCG Gold 750W 80 Plus Gold Modular Power Supply

Fractal Design Define R6 Midi Tower Case - Gunmetal Grey Tempered Glass

Corsair Force MP510 480GB NVMe PCIe M.2 SSD (CSSD-F480GBMP510) (OS Drive)

Samsung SSD 850 EVO M2 500GB (Cache drive for photoshop)

Corsair Force MP510 1TB (Downloads and misc data)

WD 300GB 2.5” (Backups Veeam)

ASUS DRW-2014L1T DVD

Mellanox ConnectX-3 Ethernet Adapter 10G

2 x BenQ EW3270U 4K

Win 11

APC 1500Va UPS (Keeping this)
 
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Gaming at 4k is mainly gpu bound so cpu choice would be dependent on your other usage. The 5900x is very close to the 5800x3d in gaming at high resoloution but 12 core 24 threads would beast the 5800x3d in applications. And would be the cheaper upgrade route as you dont need a new motherboard just update the bios on yours.

Lots of choices in the you market at th3 momment 13th gen intel or AM5

Any preference ?


how's your 2070 doing at 4k ?

Getting a 7900xt (released later today) would be a solid choice for gaming but would check if you need Nvidia cuda for apps .
 
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Helfire said:
Budget wise for the upgrade/new build is around £1500-2000
Click to expand...
Your base system looks too good to throw away .... so a 5900X makes a lot of sense, 50% more cores and faster single thread, so big uplift.
That 2070 is the real weak link, not a 4K card ... you could wait but the 6900XT deal at £699 is a tempter and your psu 'should' cope as its good quality, in tests they deal with over 800W.
 
Agree with the above, you have a solid board, so a drop-in upgrade to a 5900X would be an ideal choice. Dump the rest on the graphics card, maybe a 4080 if you can get a decent deal.
 
turbot1984 said:
Your base system looks too good to throw away .... so a 5900X makes a lot of sense, 50% more cores and faster single thread, so big uplift.
That 2070 is the real weak link, not a 4K card ... you could wait but the 6900XT deal at £699 is a tempter and your psu 'should' cope as its good quality, in tests they deal with over 800W.
Click to expand...
... I may have been slightly optimistic on the psu .... not such a deal if you have to buy a 1000W psu to run a 6900XT lol.
ggiAr8L.jpg
 
The 2070 is limiting at 4K hence in the near future an upgrade will be in order., but as my current screens only do 60fps, will upgrade both together very soon. Some of the image editing software does really hammer the 2070 at 100% like topaz AI also used almost 25GB+ ram.
I'm happy to sell the old system and rebuild from scratch as i will need to be getting at least another 3-4 years out of it,

Option 1
so maxing in the current system out with a AM4 Ryzen 9 5950x and better GPU keeping same everything else (maybe PSU if needed)

Option 2AMD
A new rebuild keeping what i can for now and upgrading CPU, MB, Ram, OS drive and maybe cooler, PSU. AMD AM5 Ryzen 9 7000 series or Intel LGA1700 i9 13 series and DDR5 ram 32/64GB
 
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Helfire said:
The 2070 is limiting at 4K hence in the near future an upgrade will be in order., but as my current screens only do 60fps, will upgrade both together very soon. Some of the image editing software does really hammer the 2070 at 100% like topaz AI also used almost 25GB+ ram.
I'm happy to sell the old system and rebuild from scratch as i will need to be getting at least another 3-4 years out of it,

Option 1
so maxing in the current system out with a AM4 Ryzen 9 5950x and better GPU keeping same everything else (maybe PSU if needed)

Option 2AMD
A new rebuild keeping what i can for now and upgrading CPU, MB, Ram, OS drive and maybe cooler, PSU. AMD AM5 Ryzen 9 7000 series or Intel LGA1700 i9 13 series and DDR5 ram 32/64GB
Click to expand...
Your spot on I would look at your most intense applications and see if it favours AMD or INTEL .
 
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Helfire said:
Option 1
so maxing in the current system out with a AM4 Ryzen 9 5950x and better GPU keeping same everything else (maybe PSU if needed)

Option 2
A new rebuild keeping what i can for now and upgrading CPU, MB, Ram, OS drive and maybe cooler, PSU. AMD AM5 Ryzen 9 7000 series or Intel LGA1700 i9 13 series and DDR5 ram 32/64GB
Click to expand...

I think option 1 is best for if you game more than you work, since e.g. a 4080 would make 4K gaming a lot more viable for you, while option 2 is the opposite and will get you on a new platform (with more storage, USB, etc) for hopefully bigger CPU gains in the future. The platform upgrade is not necessary for gaming right now and you'd be stuck with a 2070. A 5900/5950X would still be a big upgrade for both uses.
 
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Trying to decide looking at the RX 6900 XT for £699 offer on OC or a friend is upgrading and wants to sell his RTX 3080 ti FE for £650 . Im going to upgrade my CPU to 5950x to keep my system good for a while longer. Don't mind upgrading my psu. So do you think get one of these cards or wait for something more modern when/if prices drop ?
 
Oooff that's tough, don't think there's much between those two cards in traditional rasterized gaming but the 3080 will do a lot better in RT and comes with more features (but the 6900XT has more RAM).
 
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