PC Ugrade assistance

S

Snooble

Gawd
Joined
Mar 19, 2004
Messages
865
Hi

I've been thinking on upgrading my PC and handing my current one to my son. Where should I start?

Intel Core i5 3570
Asus P8Z77 motherboard
12gigs ram
GeForce 980 GTX
a few hard drives (2 solid state, 2 3.5")
EVGA 750W PSU (brand new)

That's the long and short of it.

I do a fair amount of gaming when I can, and there are several on the horizon that look good. Am I losing out with my build? I don't seem to have many issues running at 1080 with most everything maxed these days but sometimes I feel that a bit more power under the hood wouldn't hurt.

So where would you folks start? Nothing over the top, I just bought a 55" 4k TV and my wife almost killed me. Guess that's what happens when you tell her you need to buy juice and walk out with one while she's been in the car..
 
Snooble said:
Hi

I've been thinking on upgrading my PC and handing my current one to my son. Where should I start?

Intel Core i5 3570
Asus P8Z77 motherboard
12gigs ram
GeForce 980 GTX
a few hard drives (2 solid state, 2 3.5")
EVGA 750W PSU (brand new)

That's the long and short of it.

I do a fair amount of gaming when I can, and there are several on the horizon that look good. Am I losing out with my build? I don't seem to have many issues running at 1080 with most everything maxed these days but sometimes I feel that a bit more power under the hood wouldn't hurt.

So where would you folks start? Nothing over the top, I just bought a 55" 4k TV and my wife almost killed me. Guess that's what happens when you tell her you need to buy juice and walk out with one while she's been in the car..
Click to expand...

Wait for a GTX 2080 Ti
 
What games do you play and what parts do you plan on giving your son?
 
If you're gaming at 1080p, then your GTX 980 should be fine for now. You definitely do *not* need to 'wait for a GTX (RTX?) 2080 Ti", since something along those lines would be absolute overkill for 1080p gaming, especially considering the cost.

Honestly, you're not in a horrible spot where you are would be my guess. You could easily be a candidate for a move to a CPU with more cores/threads; you didn't say 3570k, so I'm assuming you're not overclocking and that puts your stock speeds at 3.8 GHz turbo. Moving to a more modern platform has other benefits; USB 3.1 gen 2, USB-C if you need it, NVME interfaces, etc, if any of that is of use. On the other hand, if you're not currently CPU limited, it's a lot of money (DDR4 hurts) for an upgrade that you could possibly wait on.

Here's your decision: do you want to give your PC away to your kid or not?

If yes, then I'd pick up a nice Ryzen 1600, 1700, 2600, or 2700 (wherever the price is right) along with 16 GB of DDR4 3000+ RAM that's Ryzen happy. Put it on an inexpensive motherboard and lightly OC it, or let the system auto-OC that works too. Combine it with either a RX580 8GB, GTX 1060 6gb, or if you feel like splurging move up to the 1070 or Vega 56 category. With the launch of the 2080 series, there's likely to be some inexpensive GPUs for sale second hand, that might be a good cost savings measure.

If you don't want to give your PC away to your kid, then just wait- your current games run well, and the longer you wait the more you get for your money, especially if you can wait out the DDR4 prices.
 
I just picked up a 4K tv to game on, even at 1080 my games look really nice now (old tv was 5 years old). I might get a Tomahawk B450, Ryzen 2600 and 16Gb of 3333 ram, and keep my 980 for a little while. My son has a 760 he's using right now, but the rest is quite old. I do have a 560Ti he could put in to run the PhysX.

With the volatile ram prices, China and tariffs it'll be interesting to see where the prices pan out on Black Friday.
 
Picking up a second-hand RX470+ or 1060+ type GPU and plopping it into your son's PC would do wonders and probably not be too expensive. With mining having tapered off, the secondary market isn't so ridiculous anymore. I just find it hard to recommend anyone upgrade now with DDR4 price drops, Zen2, and the 9th-gen Intel CPUs all likely to drop in 2019.
 
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