Upgrade itch

dink

dink

dink

Associate
Joined
14 Feb 2014
Posts
730
Current Spec:

i7 3770
16GB
GTX 980ti
Samsung SSD
North Q Black magic PSU (think it’s 750W)
Anidees AI-6B Midi Tower Case
1080p TV (not overly fussed about 4K at the minute)

Expectations:
60fps with all the bells and whistles at 1080p, would really like to give ray tracing a go (I know all the pros and cons and am fully invested in giving it a go).

I want to stick with intel and Nvidia so I’m not fussed about going the AMD route.

Options:

1) Buy a Asus RTX 2080 around £600 and hope my CPU isn’t too much of a bottleneck. Could start here then move to one of the other options if it doesn’t work out.

2) Buy an i9 9900k, 16GB RAM, motherboard, cooler, and hope it all works with my current case and PSU. Stick with 980ti and live without ray tracing for a bit until it matures.

3) Option 2 plus sack off the 980ti and add an RTX 2080.

4) Complete new i9 build with a new case and everything, I’ve totalled it all up around £1800. Quite fancy this if I’m honest as it’s been ages since I’ve built a PC.

5) Leave as is, and wait it out another year.

Please help me make a decision! Thanks, potential build below...

My basket at Overclockers UK:
Total: £1,919.12 (includes shipping: £25.20)​
​
 
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dink said:
Current Spec:

i7 3770
16GB
GTX 980ti
Samsung SSD
North Q Black magic PSU (think it’s 750W)
Anidees AI-6B Midi Tower Case
1080p TV (not overly fussed about 4K at the minute)

Expectations:
60fps with all the bells and whistles at 1080p, would really like to give ray tracing a go (I know all the pros and cons and am fully invested in giving it a go).

I want to stick with intel and Nvidia so I’m not fussed about going the AMD route.

Options:

1) Buy a Asus RTX 2080 around £600 and hope my CPU isn’t too much of a bottleneck. Could start here then move to one of the other options if it doesn’t work out.

2) Buy an i9 9900k, 16GB RAM, motherboard, cooler, and hope it all works with my current case and PSU. Stick with 980ti and live without ray tracing for a bit until it matures.

3) Option 2 plus sack off the 980ti and add an RTX 2080.

4) Complete new i9 build with a new case and everything, I’ve totalled it all up around £1800. Quite fancy this if I’m honest as it’s been ages since I’ve built a PC.

5) Leave as is, and wait it out another year.

Please help me make a decision! Thanks, potential build below...

My basket at Overclockers UK:
Total: £1,919.12 (includes shipping: £25.20)
​
Click to expand...

SAve cash, better board, better card warranty .

Even 2070 super is over kill for 1080p 60hz, 2060 or 5700xt would do the job cheaper


My basket at Overclockers UK:
Total: £1,519.63 (includes shipping: £11.70)
​

Intel is faster then ryzen at 1080p, but again, need a 144hx screen to take advantage . Ditched the 9900k for 9700k as perform the same in gaming .

£500 saving !!! Specially if you pick up rocket NVMe 1TB for cheaper then Coraair, crucial Sport 3200hz ram for same price and Riotoro G2 650 for cheaper which is Focus rebranded , that's £50 saving in top. 9700k could push another £30 off

Dark rock 4 cooler , saves another £35

2070 super fine for ray tracing.

Need more power the. 2080 Gaming OC for 4 yr warranty
 
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Only review I can find for that brand PSU shows very cheap random lottery brand Chinese capacitors.
So that's the first part to change.
Simply no sense to risk any new parts with questionable condition PSU.
That Seasonic Focus+ is OcUK's best priced 10 year warranty PSU.

Case has modular HDD cages and would be rather versatile to keep in use.
https://www.eteknix.com/anidees-ai-6b-mid-tower-chassis-review/3/
https://www.eteknix.com/anidees-ai-6b-mid-tower-chassis-review/4/
Would just add good pressure capability fans, like Arctic P12/P14, with that door/front mask being somewhat restrictive.


Doubtfull that any current graphics card is really powerfull enough for it when games start using ray tracing more.
Which will no doubt happen after next-gen consoles arriving in about year.
Also GPU competition is finally starting to heat up after very long stagnation. (AMD has high end card coming during winter)
So any more expensive graphics card is certainly bad choise for money and longevity.
And performance per buck anyway takes dive from cliffs of Dover after £500 level.

Certainly for that resolution there's no sense to pay expensive prices, if you're playing at 60Hz.


Also on CPU side 9700K is overpriced when Ryzen 3700X costs £340 and comes with 16 threads.
Next-gen consoles coming with underclocked 3700X is certainly going to start lifting bar in how many cores heavy games expect to have for themselves.
And with 9700K Windows processes and background stuff are cutting straight into available core count, making it faster vulnerable to hiccups from CPU "running out of workers to do all the tasks."
If you had bought that advertised to be enough for gaming 4c/4t i5 instead of i7, you would be certainly having more frame rate drops in games.

That rebranded 6th gen Skylake architecture CPU even has most of the same speculative code execution vulnerabilities than your old Ivy Bridge.
Google Intel + these: Meltdown, Spectre, Spoiler, Fallout, RIDL, Zombieload.
Intel simply cut seriously in corners 10+ years ago and hasn't ever bothered to fix that in hardware.


For CPU cooling Scythe Mugen 5 is high end cooler bang per buck winner at £43.
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/scythe-scmg-5100-mugen-5-rev.b-cpu-cooler-hs-046-sy.html
It's there with Dark Rock 4 step behind the best heatpipe coolers beating majority of waterpipe coolers in continuous cooling per noise.
With second set of fan clips included two Arctic P12s in push-pull could likely squeeze some more performance

While still having full 4 DIMM memory clearance.
16 GB of RAM likely isn't going to cut it that long in high end needing upgrade.
Next-gen consoles are no doubt going to lift bar in what amount of memory games are designed for.
And 16GB is more like 12GB after Wintoys10 and usual background stuff have grabbed what they want.


For gaming PC storage expensive per GB drives aren't worth their cost.
For real world game loading times there's barely any difference even to SATA SSDs from highest snake oil synthetic benchmarketing number drives:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=nvme+ssd+hdd
Actually even synthetic benchmarks give quite similar results for all drives when using settings relevant for gaming use.
Pretty much SATA SSD priced per GB Kingston A2000 would do job as well as any.

And unlike cheaper per GB Corsair MP510 Samsung 970 Evo doesn't even have any higher than standard write endurance specs!
Even very affordable Transcend MTE220S would have better endurance specs than 970 Evo.


With money cut from excess/brand hype there would be other things to consider for upgrading gaming immersion.
Like 2560x1440 144Hz monitor.
Or that other part of gaming immersion, sound reproduction, unless you have some home theater surround set up.
Alternatively binaural sound simulation and good headphones are way for good immersion without space/room acoustics concerns of speakers and with ridiculously small cost compared to high end graphics card.
 
Cheers,

Ordered the i9 with a 2080 and the rest to build a new PC rather than upgrading my old one.

The price different between i7 and i9, and 2070 super, and 2080 wasn’t much anyway imo, although couldn’t justify over hundred more for the 2080 super. Sacked off the SSD idea and I’ll reuse my existing one so I can repair windows rather than reinstall.

Someone’s offered me £300 for my old PC so that’s a bonus if it works out.

Excited to build it tomorrow if it all turns up, payed for next day delivery. Hopefully should last me a few more years now!
 
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