Upgrade GPU or get a new build

[xrankorex]

So I've had my desktop PC for quite some time and I have been upgrading parts throughout the years. I'm having to play new ly released games on high to medium settings now and I think it's time to either upgrade my GPU to 1080/1080ti or just completely build a new computer. If I upgrade my GPU only, will my CPU bottleneck it? Thoughts?

Current Specs Below:

i7 950 Bloomfield OCed
Asus Sabertooh
12gb RAM
770GTX
Cosair AIO
250gb SSD
3x HDDs for storage
evga 750 psu
2x asus 144hz monitors

If I were to do a new build it would be the below spec:

i7 7700k
Asrock x270 Taichi
eVGA 850
32gb ram
deepcool gamer storm AIO
250gb mva
1080ti or 1080


I mainly game (BF1, CoD, Blizzard Games, LoL, single player RPG games), do Photoshop, and design on MS office stuff.

 

[DaveSimmons]

The GTX 1080 / ti will make much more of a difference than the new CPU and extra RAM. You could buy it now and see if you're happy with just that boost.

If you are, you could give AMD and its partners more time to smooth over the rough edges on Ryzen, then decide between the 6-core/12-thread 1600X vs. the 4-core/8-thread 7700K.

 

[xrankorex]

My OC is at 3.7 on the i7 950. Do you think I will see limited performance if I just upgrade the video card or will it be negligible?

 

[lehtv]

I would say you get a pretty substantial boost in most games, i.e. easily noticeable. It could still be limited compared to the performance you'd expect with GTX 1080 paired with a modern CPU, but I highly doubt it will be negligible. The old i7 will limit performance situationally, this shows as fps dips whenever something more CPU intensive is going on.

You can easily find out if a graphics card upgrade can get you the performance boost you want: simply lower your display resolution from 1920x1080 to 1280x720. This will nearly double the capacity of your current GPU to push out frames, which simulates the scenario of upgrading from GTX 770 to GTX 1060 (see AT bench). Decrease it further down to 800x600 to see if there's any point in ugprading beyond GTX 1060. If the fps doesn't increase as much as you'd like, you need to upgrade the CPU as well. It would be best to play a variety of games for a few hours on 1280x720 to get a good sense of the amount of CPU bottleneck you get and in what situations.

 

[DaveSimmons]

^ Good advice. The reason to get a 1080/ti even if it is bottlenecked is if you do still plan to upgrade the CPU within the next year or so. Then you'll already have the GPU and just need the other parts.

 

[bigboxes]

I'd put that i7 950 to other use. That new build sounds great. My i7 920 has been pulling duty in a HTPC for about a year now. When I built the rig in my sig (about 2 years ago) I was getting tired of the heat coming off that old Nahelam chip. Was just looking in a box at the TRUE I had cooling it back in the day. Memories.

 

[xrankorex]

I would say you get a pretty substantial boost in most games, i.e. easily noticeable. It could still be limited compared to the performance you'd expect with GTX 1080 paired with a modern CPU, but I highly doubt it will be negligible. The old i7 will limit performance situationally, this shows as fps dips whenever something more CPU intensive is going on.

You can easily find out if a graphics card upgrade can get you the performance boost you want: simply lower your display resolution from 1920x1080 to 1280x720. This will nearly double the capacity of your current GPU to push out frames, which simulates the scenario of upgrading from GTX 770 to GTX 1060 (see AT bench). Decrease it further down to 800x600 to see if there's any point in ugprading beyond GTX 1060. If the fps doesn't increase as much as you'd like, you need to upgrade the CPU as well. It would be best to play a variety of games for a few hours on 1280x720 to get a good sense of the amount of CPU bottleneck you get and in what situations.

Thanks for the advice! I think I'm going to head this route.

 

[sm625]

I wouldnt even bother testing at lower resolutions. Just buy the 1080! Yes you'll be bottlenecked, but it will still be hella fast.

 

[Valantar]

Please define "bottlenecked" ...

Unless your CPU (and RAM and everything else outside of the GPU) is the very fastest in every metric ever (single core, multi core, various instructions, caches, and so on), all systems are bottlenecked by something. Thus, the relevant question is this: will your current CPU reduce performance of a new card so much as to make it not worth the upgrade? The easy answer: no. The more complicated answer: while combining a 1080 or 1080Ti with an i7 950 of course won't give you the same performance as the same GPU with a more modern CPU, differences will in all likelyhood be small enough for you not to care. And very, very few games will hit a CPU ceiling anywhere near reasonable framerates to begin with.

I bought a Fury X to go along with my Core2Quad Q9450 close to two years ago - and I haven't regretted it for a second. Am I CPU limited? Yes, in pretty much every single game, even with the CPU running at 3.5GHz (watching CPU usage while gaming usually shows between 80 and 100% load on all 4 cores). But I still get performance around 10% below reviews of the GPU, which is still far better than a cheaper, weaker GPU would give me. Not to mention that I get a "free" GPU boost when I replace my CPU. In other words, by not listening to people saying "don't match a high-end GPU with an old CPU!" I squeezed another two years out of my PC. Not to mention that you have a newer CPU with twice as many threads, higher clocks, a better architecture, and faster RAM (I'm still on DDR2!). You'll be fine for a while yet. Hold off on the CPU upgrade a while yet - you'll get more cores and threads for the same money in a year or two (heck, yo do so today with Ryzen!).

 

[Darthbaggins]

I would say if you're in the market to update your rig, I would go ahead and do a new build and turn your old rig into a media server/lan rig. Personally I went with Haswell-E (5930k 6core12thread 40lanes) x99 my last build and have not been disappointed since I have room to upgrade for quite some time without worrying about much of anything. I can say the next upgrade I'm planning is my monitor since I recently upgraded from a GTX 970 to a GTX 1080, so my Asus VS238H 1080p 60hz is limiting me fps and resolution wise.

 

[RaistlinZ]

You may try buying a 6-core Xeon x5660 for about $30.00 on eBay, overclocking it, and pairing it with a GTX 1080.

 

[scannall]

You may try buying a 6-core Xeon x5660 for about $30.00 on eBay, overclocking it, and pairing it with a GTX 1080.

Those are usually pretty easy to overclock to the 4.2 to 4.8 Ghz range, depending on the silicon lottery.