to upgrade or not?

Bri62 · 24 Mar 2022 at 09:48

Hi I have a Germanium pre-built system which I bought 4 years ago i7 8700k @4.9gHz 1080ti and 16 gigs of 3200 ram.
Getting the itch to upgrade, and wondering as I'm not really in the tech loop if this is a good/bad time to upgrade, I game @1440p on a 37"ultra wide.
I realise the next gen gfx is end of the year but will we see the same shortages with the 40 cards as we did on the 30 cards.....so thinking now the 30 cards are available and the price is dropping upgrade now?

Haz123 · 24 Mar 2022 at 10:36

Your system is well balanced and for a decent uplift in performance you should be looking at 3070ti or better or just not worthwhile. If your games play OK i would not bother.

The next gen of Nv and AMD cards are going to be made on the TSMC 5nm process and the allocation for this node was sold last year with Apple buying 50% and Intel/NV/AMD buying up the majority of the remaining waifers. This will mean there will be a limited amount of cards available.

The next gen from Nv and AMD is a first for gpus with chiplet design and an infinity fabric to connect them. By all accounts they are going to be extremely power hungry and very very expensive. I can see a lot of potential customers being put off by the power requirements (new psu may be needed) and price.

I think there will be short supply but the primary cause of this gens shortages was the mining idiocy and that is hopefully not going to effect the next gen as much.

MissChief · 24 Mar 2022 at 12:42

Upgrade the graphics card, maybe consider a bigger SSD or NVME for game storage, job done for now.

Bri62 · 24 Mar 2022 at 13:41

MissChief said:
Upgrade the graphics card, maybe consider a bigger SSD or NVME for game storage, job done for now.

Wouldn't the 8700k bottle neck a 30 series card?

MissChief · 24 Mar 2022 at 14:20

Bri62 said:
Wouldn't the 8700k bottle neck a 30 series card?

perhaps, but it'll be slight. They will get a performance increase. I went from a 6700k paired with a GTX980 to a GTX 1080 and then a RTX2070 Super and saw a significant performance increase every time. I wouldn't go over maybe a 3070 though.

Tetras · 24 Mar 2022 at 18:52

Bri62 said:
Wouldn't the 8700k bottle neck a 30 series card?

A 8700K near 5 Ghz is still very competitive with nearly anything, especially at higher resolutions.

EsaT · 25 Mar 2022 at 15:02

Graphics card could uses update depending on resolution and what you play.

On CPU side would recommend waiting for maturing of DDR5 and better prices.