GTX980 and i7 920

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lhernandez

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I'm currently running two GTX 660's in SLI and I'm thinking it's time for an upgrade. I have my eyes set on a GTX 980 but I'm not sure if I should consider a new Mobo, CPU & RAM as well.

Currently running a i7 920 OC'd to 3.9Ghz on a ASUS P6T with 12GB of DDR3 PC3-12800.

Time for a new PC or just upgrade the GPU?
 
Don't know ur answer but it would not be that expensive to snag up a 4790k combo at microcenter if you have one locally. Great for gaming. Sli would run at 8x and only a single card at 16x but don't tell my cards that! Haha there plenty happy and I have not pverclocked the cpu yet and boosts to 4400mhz.
 
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why not just upgrade the GPU first and see how it performs, and if it still leaves you underwhelmed, then upgrade everything else also?
 
The 920 will bottleneck some games with the 980, Battlefield for instance. The 980 will not be utilized fully. I think a 970 would be a better bet if you don't want to upgrade your entire system, or if you can go ahead and upgrade it all and then you are set for another 5+ years.
 
I just recently upgraded to my 4690k and I got an improvement in a lot of games even with my 770. Albiet games that historically were more CPU bound, but across the board it was a big improvement IMO.
 
HeavensCloud said:
The 920 will bottleneck some games with the 980, Battlefield for instance. The 980 will not be utilized fully. I think a 970 would be a better bet if you don't want to upgrade your entire system, or if you can go ahead and upgrade it all and then you are set for another 5+ years.
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Is there a specific spec on the i7 920 that makes you say it will bottleneck a gtx980? Also, what Intel based cpu and mobo would you recommend as an upgrade (out perform i7 920 OC's 3.9ghz)? This PC is strictly for gaming.
 
Very popular intel cpu for gaming is what I have. The i7 4790k. 4ghz default and boosts to 4.4ghz. Anything more ur talking alot more money in the motherboard to use and ddr4 ram.
 
lhernandez said:
Is there a specific spec on the i7 920 that makes you say it will bottleneck a gtx980?
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It's the fact that it's an old proc. Look up results on Battlefield 4 performance with a 920, it's a huge bottleneck, whereas the GTX 980 would be using half its resources and still giving you solid 60 FPS at 1440P without skipping a beat (paired with a better CPU), that's a bottleneck for the old 920.
 
HeavensCloud said:
It's the fact that it's an old proc. Look up results on Battlefield 4 performance with a 920, it's a huge bottleneck, whereas the GTX 980 would be using half its resources and still giving you solid 60 FPS at 1440P without skipping a beat (paired with a better CPU), that's a bottleneck for the old 920.
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I think it depends on what resolution he's gaming at.

For instance, according to to this graph at the techspot, a stock i7 920 is only a few FPS behind the new (and higher clocked) i7s. But it should also be taken into account that the OP's i7 920 is OC'd to 3.9GHz, which is about a 50% over-clock. If a i7 920 is only 5fps behind a newer and 1GHz faster i7, then I have a difficult time believing that an OC'd i7 920 would hold anything back. And of course a R9 290x isn't as fast as a GTX 980, but it's no slouch either.

I personally run an OC'd i7 920, and an OC'd GTX 780, and game at 2560 x 1440, and i'm pretty sure it's the video card that is holding me back.
 
I personally went from an i7-920 to a 5820 with dual 970's. The performance increase was HUGE in some games. The 980 and 970 are not that far apart so single cards I'm not sure you would get the same benefit or not but I can tell you in SLI that the new chip fixed a lot stuttering problems I had in games and some of the FPS I saw increase was insane.
 
Thanks you for all your replies. I ended up ordering a completely new system that will hopefully last me another 6 years. Here's what I ordered.

CPU: i7 4790k
MoBo: ASUS SABERTOOTH Z97 MARK1
RAM: G.SKILL Sniper Series 16GB (2 x 8GB)
SSD: SAMSUNG 850 EVO 1TB
Video Card: EVGA 04G-P4-2986-KR GeForce GTX 980 4GB
Power Supply: EVGA Supernova 1000 WATT
 
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lhernandez said:
Thanks you for all your replies. I ended up ordering a completely new system that will hopefully last me another 6 years. Here's what I ordered.

CPU: i7 4790
MoBo: ASUS SABERTOOTH Z97 MARK1
RAM: G.SKILL Sniper Series 16GB (2 x 8GB)
SSD: SAMSUNG 850 EVO 1TB
Video Card: EVGA 04G-P4-2986-KR GeForce GTX 980 4GB
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I really hope thats a 4790k.
 
I upgraded from an I7 950 overclocked on air at 4.2ghz to a 4790k. I am running a EVGA GTX 780ti Classified. I play BF4 on my Dell U3011 and honestly I did not see much difference at all. When I asked about the upgrade most stated my CPU was holding me back. My vote is for the GPU route and see if you like the improvement and go from there.
 
Grunt said:
I upgraded from an I7 950 overclocked on air at 4.2ghz to a 4790k. I am running a EVGA GTX 780ti Classified. I play BF4 on my Dell U3011 and honestly I did not see much difference at all. When I asked about the upgrade most stated my CPU was holding me back. My vote is for the GPU route and see if you like the improvement and go from there.
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Dude already made his decision.

That said, it would be cool if OP came back and told us about the results from that beastly upgrade :D
 
Grunt said:
I upgraded from an I7 950 overclocked on air at 4.2ghz to a 4790k. I am running a EVGA GTX 780ti Classified. I play BF4 on my Dell U3011 and honestly I did not see much difference at all. When I asked about the upgrade most stated my CPU was holding me back. My vote is for the GPU route and see if you like the improvement and go from there.
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probably because you have the game maxed out at 1600p. when using lower resolutions and/or going for framerates >120 the cpu becomes the bottleneck. my 2500k bottlenecks me in bf4 pretty badly even on max settings, to the point where my 970 occasionally sits around 60% usage. you NEED an overclocked 4770k or better to get 120 in that game.
 
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eclypse said:
Don't know ur answer but it would not be that expensive to snag up a 4790k combo at microcenter if you have one locally. Great for gaming. Sli would run at 8x and only a single card at 16x but don't tell my cards that! Haha there plenty happy and I have not pverclocked the cpu yet and boosts to 4400mhz.
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That's probably because they are running in PCIe 3.0 x8, which has similar bandwidth to PCIe 2.0 16x, and even today you really don't need much more than that to max out top end GPU's.

IMHO, when GPU's went from PCIe 2 to PCIe 3 the big winners were SLI setups on PCIe lane restricted systems, as dropping down to x8 suddenly didn't matter as much at all
 
I'd like to see results...I think the CPU bottleneck most people immediatly jump too is grossly overstated, especially with ever increasing resolutions.

My 2600k is still humming along with the 780ti and I can see very, very little reason to change cpu/mb even at this point...
 
I have an i7 930 @ 4.2 Ghz and I don't see any noticeable bottleneck at all. My FPS very closely matches up with benchmarks with PC's that have much more modern CPU's than mine. There will be a decent performance boost when upgrading your processor of course, but the GTX 980 shouldn't be significantly hindered by it in any way. Hell, I'm going to SLI my GTX 980's before I upgrade the rest. You'll easily run everything out at ultra settings, 1200P, 60+ FPS, etc. - I've been playing Hardline in 64-player Hotwire and I don't think I've noticed the FPS drop beneath 60 FPS once at max settings.

Probably would be smarter to upgrade to the Xeon 5650 if you really needed to scratch that itch and then hold on until Skylake is rolled out. The Xeon 5650 is dirt-cheap (~$80) and comparable to an i7-4960x if overclocked. No bottleneck and you'd be able to hold out for the newer technology.

That info might not help the OP at this point but I'm sure there are other people in similar positions who are curious what their LGA 1366 brothers are planning.
 
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I too would like to see some results. While I don't doubt that the i7 920 is old (Come on, I've had this thing for 6 YEARS now), and pretty much anything out there would constitute an "upgrade", I'm not too sure that the observable performance improvement is worth the cost.
 
I can't see page 2 of this thread for some strange reason.

EDIT: Thanks to the guy below me my issue is fixed.
 
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User CP > Edit Options > Thread Display Options > Number of Posts to Show Per Page > Show 40 posts per page


oh wait, you won't be able to see this..... :D
 
I am still loving my [email protected] with my 680 sli. The addition of a RoG Swift Monitor, allows me to continue having an awesome gaming experience.

IMHO Im good to go. I am more curious about what Direct X 12 will bring to the table. Maybe when the next family of CPUs and GPUs arrive along with Win 10.:)
 
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