Upgrading 3600X + 1070Ti

[moppy89]

My motorbike got stolen and I've hopefully got some insurance money heading my way, how best to upgrade my PC?

Currently have a 3600x + 1070Ti combo in a NR200 with a beefy 850 W PSU.

My plan is to just do a drop in GPU upgrade to something ~6900XT. Currently have a 1440p 70hz monitor but planning on moving the PC to the living room. So will be gaming at 4k and the TV can only do 60hz.

I mostly play single player games like GoW, XCOM, TLoU etc.

Hoping to keep the spend as close to £300 as possible. What do we think? Is the 3600X gonna be a problem? Is my budget unrealistic? Any other issues I should be thinking of?

 

[moppy89]

you're sure you don't want to spend it on another bike?

Thankfully not having swapped petrol power for much cheaper but significantly more painful pedal power

 

[moppy89]

If you can net a 6900XT for £300 even second hand I'll be impressed, but I do think you're going to be held back by your CPU with a card like that. I saw issues with a 3700X and a 4070 at both 1440p, and to an admittedly lesser extent 4k, dropping in a 5800X3D was hugely beneficial and something like a 6900xT is higher end.

If I were you and buying new, you can get an XFX 6800 for £370 and then a 5700X3D for around the £200-210 mark, which would overall see pretty hefty uplift in everything that you play. If going second hand you may save some cash here and there, but those would still be the base levels of hardware I'd personally consider in your situation.

Also consider bumping up to 32gb of RAM if you're currently on 16gb, more modern games are becoming increasingly resource hungry in that regard.

I'm gonna have to look at some benchmarks etc to see how badly the 3600 is going to hold things back.

While I can see the reasoning behind plumping for the 5800x3d, it basically means sinking double the amount of money I had been planning.

 

[moppy89]

you've joined the lycra-clad mob

for me, the most obvious choice would be to swap the 1070ti to a radeon 6800
then sell the 3600x and 1070ti and use the funds from that to upgrade the cpu to a 5600/x

ps: you will need to update the bios before you swap the cpu

Yeah afraid so with the lycra! Which does give me the idea of seeing what I'd get selling off my motorbiking gear...

 

[moppy89]

I largely agree with this, but with the 5700X3D being so close to £200 - £210 I find the 5600 a hard sell unless under the £100 mark for existing users. It's the difference between a stop gap and an end of platform top tier CPU with another GPU upgrade behind it

The 5600 would absolutely be worthwhile, especially with the intent of playing at 4k, but my bias pushes me toward an actual eol platform chip to eke out more long term use.

I don't really upgrade very often (hence the 1070ti) and will probably be sticking to AM4 for a long time to come yet...

I guess the question I'm really trying to answer is: am I going to be severely bottlenecking a 6900xt with a 3600x at 4k?

If I am, then I might as well hold off on upgrading anything until GPU prices have dropped a fair bit and I can try and do GPU+CPU upgrade for £500 tops

 

[moppy89]

there's still a bit of confusion as to how much your actual budget will be because we don't know if you'll want your original £300 to be supplanted by selling your motorbiking gear and/or old 3600x + 1070ti
also, do you want to buy new or used or have no preference?

both the above will dictate what is suggested

The plan was to stick to a budget of ~£300 which includes whatever I can get back from selling the 1070Ti (maybe 80-100?)

But I think I've clearly way underestimated current GPU pricing. Having seen the 7900GRE for ~520 I assumed the 6900 would have depreciated a little more. Is £350 more realistic here?

And yes I would be looking to buy everything used, I don't imagine I'll get much worth upgrading to if I was buying new

 

[moppy89]

for guide 2nd hand here, 6800 is along the lines of 3070 performance..last one i saw of those went for £265 including delivery...last 3080 i saw for £350 incl. and 6900Xt £365 plus shipping which was only a month or so ago. 6800 going to struggle a little playing 4k though imho.... it's really a decent 1440


If you look at the below , you'll see a relative performance section in the middle left part of pg where you can see a 7800xt is roughly 97% of the performance of the 6900xt, a 6800xt is is 93% , a 6800 is 82%(or another way is the 6900xt is roughly 22% faster than the 6800)...and conversely the 7900gre is 7% faster

AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT Specs

AMD Navi 21, 2250 MHz, 5120 Cores, 320 TMUs, 128 ROPs, 16384 MB GDDR6, 2000 MHz, 256 bit

www.techpowerup.com

personally, I'd also look at power draws (i did this once working out from my son's 30hrs+ gaming a week)..uk price at mo has dropped but still av 24.5p per kw/h....something like a 6900xt can be drawing 300w power while gaming whereas a 7800xt is 250w or a 4070 201w...or 4070super 218w

so a 100w an hour gaming difference is 0.1kw/h...30hours a week is 30*0.1 =3. 52 weeks =156kw/h times that by electricity cost and thats 156x 24.5= 3,822p or £38.22. do that for 3 years of keeping card and at current electricity price you're paying £114.66 more in electricity to play same game . then factor in 2nd hand price of gpu 3 years from now...6900xt will be 6 years old and 2 generations behind, whereas 4070super will only be 3years old and prob 1 generation behind. for me if buying, i'd pay more for a 3yrs old 4070super than a 6yrs old 6900xt

using 4070s at 218w, diff in electricity cost over 3years is £94. i only say this as a £620 4070super sold 2nd hand here recently for £470...now add the £94 on the £365 a 6900xt sold for and you're at £459...so 3 years down the line,if electricity stays same price and you game 30hrs a week, if a 4070super sells for £11 more than a 6900xt 2nd hand you've made a profit by getting the newer card...that alos brings benefit of dlss and frame generation, which would be a significant uplift for single player games

if you keep card for 6 years, then double the electricity savings of course

if you don't game a lot then savings go down and older card becomes decent again..game a lot, and newer card becomes a better long term buy...

Thanks for that, that's a lot to mull over.

As someone with 2 kids and a job, 30 hours a week of gaming isn't anywhere in my immediate future but I get your point! That's kinda why I thought the 6900s would be cheaper at this point but seems not.

I hadn't really considered Nvidia just because I don't like upgrading often and regardless of what voodoo they're able to pull off, I cant understand paying >500 for a 12GB card in 2024!

 

[moppy89]

Just seen a 6900xt sell for £350inc p&p on another forum I'm on. I'm sure £300 will be here soon (tm)

 

[moppy89]

Where there is one, there will soon be another I hope.

I've also realised my PSU is only 750W although I thought I remembered buying a 850W so not sure if it was up to it.

 

[moppy89]

That's the problem with not upgrading very often, you tend to forget whats in there. Especially since I don't have a windowed case

 

[moppy89]

Update!

Ended up grabbing a 4070 Super which is way overkill for my 1440p 70Hz screen...and then one of my friends gave me his first gen Acer X34 Predator (UWQHD 120Hz) which feels like a great pairing!

Currently playing Mafia: Definitive Edition which probably isn't the best test for the GPU, but will finally start playing RDR 2 soon.

I originally upgraded to the 1070Ti in an effort to play RDR 2 all the way back in 2019 but it wasn't running super well. Will be good to finally play the game after a 2nd GPU upgrade!