Gaming PC Upgrade Advice

[RDY4WAR]

My PC has served me well for 8 years, but it's time to upgrade.

My current PC (built Spring 2015)...

Asus Z97-A mobo
Intel i5-4690k cpu
Nvidia GTX 980 gpu
G.Skill DDR3-2400 32GB ram
WD 250 GB SSD + 1TB HD
Corsair 900w psu

I can play most games on 1080p at 60 fps on high settings with a few exceptions. I'm upgrading my monitor to a 4k (3840 x 2160) monitor with 144 mhz refresh rate. Here's the upgraded build idea, reusing my psu, case, sound card, wifi card, and so forth...

x470 mobo
5800X3D cpu
RTX 3060-ti gpu
DDR4-3200 64GB ram
2TB SSD + 4TB HD

A friend suggested that since I don't care to go above 120 fps (I can't honestly tell the difference above that anyway) that the cpu is overkill, and I could go cheaper there and put more money toward a better gpu and ram like this....

x470 mobo
5600 cpu
RTX 3070 gpu
DDR4 3600 64GB ram
2TB SSD + 4TB HD

I mostly play open world strategy / objective based games like ARK:SE, GTA V, RDR2, etc... I don't really have a set budget, but not going to spend $1k on a gpu either. Any advice appreciated.

 

[buster]

Not a bad setup. Are you building yourself, or looking for pre-built? NZXT does a good job at a fair price. Compare what you could build one for vs NZXT.

I'm running an Nvidia 1660 @ 1440p. FPS is always above 60 fps. My 1440p monitor caps out at 95hz though so I lock my frame rate to that. I play a lot of FPS (Overwatch etc.) and always get a solid 90fps at 1440p resolution.

 

[Pew]

Both good options. I'd lean more toward the 5800X3D but the price difference of the 5600 and 5800X3D is substantial. Microcenter has the 5800X3D on sale for $300 right now - that's a heck of a deal for that CPU, and that's coming from an Intel fan.

I'd reduce the RAM to 32GB. Realistically 32GB is still alot. If you need more in the future, it'll always be there.

If you're planning on playing open-world games like RDR2 and Ark:SE at 4k, you might want more power. The 3060ti looks like it run those games under 100fps @ 4K unless you're running in low-medium settings. The 3070Ti would be a better card overall and looks like it's the same price as the non-Ti 3070.

 

[BMWTurboDzl]

I haven't looked this up in a while but I always prioritized GPU-RAM over system RAM + "better" GPU with less on board RAM. In any case I think 64GB of ram is overkill.

Optimized* games will demand less from a CPU.

*AAA titles from the big companies.

At 144hz you're limited to 144 fps anyways. The experience depends on the genre of game of course. FPS games are amazing at 144 FPS or above. Panel type also has an impact (ex, TN vs VA) on the experience.

This is what I would do. I would find out which card at max settings can push near 144 fps for your monitor and go from there.

I'm running a 1060 6GB and a 1080 240hz monitor.

Money saver could be on size of SSD and HDD. The difference may be miniscule but I'd be surprised if you really needed 6TB of space.

 

[skyactiv]

Take one for the team and buy an Intel Arc card. We need more people to buy AMD and Intel cards instead of Nvidia.

 

[RDY4WAR]

Not a bad setup. Are you building yourself, or looking for pre-built? NZXT does a good job at a fair price. Compare what you could build one for vs NZXT.

I'm running an Nvidia 1660 @ 1440p. FPS is always above 60 fps. My 1440p monitor caps out at 95hz though so I lock my frame rate to that. I play a lot of FPS (Overwatch etc.) and always get a solid 90fps at 1440p resolution.

I'd planned to do it myself as I did this one, but will price out NZXT.

Both good options. I'd lean more toward the 5800X3D but the price difference of the 5600 and 5800X3D is substantial. Microcenter has the 5800X3D on sale for $300 right now - that's a heck of a deal for that CPU, and that's coming from an Intel fan.

I'd reduce the RAM to 32GB. Realistically 32GB is still alot. If you need more in the future, it'll always be there.

If you're planning on playing open-world games like RDR2 and Ark:SE at 4k, you might want more power. The 3060ti looks like it run those games under 100fps @ 4K unless you're running in low-medium settings. The 3070Ti would be a better card overall and looks like it's the same price as the non-Ti 3070.

This is what I'm thinking as well, but the 5600x being half the price of the 5800X3D is tempting. ARK is being remastered in Unreal Engine 5 so I'm gearing up for that.

 

[Pew]

Take one for the team and buy an Intel Arc card. We need more people to buy AMD and Intel cards instead of Nvidia.

I'd be worried about extended driver support. IIRC, Intel announced Arc in the heydays of GPU mining. Now that has fallen off the map and knowing Intel's history on non-CPU ventures, I'd be surprised but happy to see extended driver support past 6 years but I doubt it.

This is what I'm thinking as well, but the 5600x being half the price of the 5800X3D is tempting. ARK is being remastered in Unreal Engine 5 so I'm gearing up for that.

Hope you're ready to buy it again; Ark developers just announced they're increasing the price of the remastered edition.

IMO, the 5600x is still a great CPU especially for it's price. Overall, I'd do a 5600x, 32GB RAM, and 3070Ti for 4k. I'd recommend a 4070Ti too but the ~$850 price sucks for a mainstream card. 2-3 GPU gens ago a mainstream GPU was $350-400 .

 

[Rand]

Why are you looking at last gen CPU's

you should be looking at amd 7000 series amd or 13th gen intel ie i5-13600k

you near a microcenter?

for gaming I would probably go i5-13600k 32GB ram a 2TB nvme pcie 4x4 ssd(look for 5000+MB/s) for gaming drive storage drive ~~12TB non shingled recording
GPU.. either reuse what you have or plan on spending 800$ for a major upgrade.

The new 7000 series 3d cache chip is looking nice but at well over 500$ is abit pricy.
13600k is around 300$ currently.

 

[KrisZ]

If you want to stick to last gen AMD, I would go with a 5700X, turn on PBO and you've got yourself a 5800X. Also go with 32GB of ram, extra is just extra money. Maybe use some of the savings to get a bit faster RAM.

But, as was suggested above, i would go with the 13th gen intel. i5 is a monster in gaming and does very well in normal computing tasks. The price difference should not be that much now, since ddr5 RAM prices went down a lot. But with Intel, you can also go with ddr4 RAM and motherboard if you wan to save money.

Honestly, either choice will be fine for the next 7-9 years, but i would seriously price out the 13th gen intel system. It may not be that much more.

Edit:
Just saw a 4k monitor with a 120k refresh rate, yeah, the 3070 gpu may not exactly be capable of that on the latest AAA games. You will almost certainly have to use DLSS for to get consistent 120fps. Nothing wrong with using DLSS, but the performance will only go down with newer games as time goes on.

 

[KrisZ]

I'd recommend a 4070Ti too but the ~$850 price sucks for a mainstream card. 2-3 GPU gens ago a mainstream GPU was $350-400 .

Yeah, the GPU market is all messed up and from the looks of it, will stay messed up for the foreseeable future.

 

[Rand]

Yeah, the GPU market is all messed up and from the looks of it, will stay messed up for the foreseeable future.

I "lucked" out and got my asus 4070ti for $800 -16% still a boatload of money.
amd 7900xt is down to about 800 too and 20GB ram.. might be better for 4k.

They had a 6950 for 650 ish a week ago.

by the time you pay 550-600$ for a 3070 you might as well spend 800 IMO
which is why I suggested keeping current video card for now.. can always find a deal after everything else is built
I used my 2060 for a month in the new pc

 

[Pew]

I don't follow AMD very closely anymore so I didn't realize the 5800X3D is already a gen old. I literally just read about it for the first time a couple months ago. I think I read the Core i5-13600k is the best bang-for-buck Intel CPU out at the moment, but I haven't seen the benchmarks for Ryzen 7 series yet.

 

[Rand]

I don't follow AMD very closely anymore so I didn't realize the 5800X3D is already a gen old. I literally just read about it for the first time a couple months ago. I think I read the Core i5-13600k is the best bang-for-buck Intel CPU out at the moment, but I haven't seen the benchmarks for Ryzen 7 series yet.

its a gen old(5800X3D) but still was the fastest amd processor for gaming until recently.

oh and price update the 7800x3d 8core is 449 at microcenter not over 500$

I still like the i5-13600k for gaming though. The raptor lake chips are beast. After 8 generations of ho hum performance improvements the 12th was a leap.. and 13th gen even better.

All my old tech nerd friends (I include myself in this) built pc's in the last year..
we had 1 amd 1 intel i9 13900k and 2 i7-13700k (mine was one of these)
they all have been reliable..
I was extremely close to buying the

AMD Ryzen 9 7900​

because it had a mobo bundle and came with 32GB free ram, but I went intel.

 

[RDY4WAR]

I'd be worried about extended driver support. IIRC, Intel announced Arc in the heydays of GPU mining. Now that has fallen off the map and knowing Intel's history on non-CPU ventures, I'd be surprised but happy to see extended driver support past 6 years but I doubt it.



Hope you're ready to buy it again; Ark developers just announced they're increasing the price of the remastered edition.

IMO, the 5600x is still a great CPU especially for it's price. Overall, I'd do a 5600x, 32GB RAM, and 3070Ti for 4k. I'd recommend a 4070Ti too but the ~$850 price sucks for a mainstream card. 2-3 GPU gens ago a mainstream GPU was $350-400 .

Not too pleased with WC withdrawing that bundle with ARK 2. I have ~7,000 hours in that game though, starting back in the alpha days, and still haven't messed with the Genesis maps so I'd say I've gotten my money's worth. It's almost like they offered the bundle and people cried so now we get nothing.

 

[RDY4WAR]

I'm also considering lowering my standards on the 4k and put more into the hardware. Instead of 4k, go with a cheaper 1440 and shoot for higher fps. I'm not going bigger than a 27" monitor anyway. Instead, put more money into the CPU with a 5900x (or equivalent) and 3070 GPU. I'll also stick with 32GB ram for now.

 

[Pew]

I'm also considering lowering my standards on the 4k and put more into the hardware. Instead of 4k, go with a cheaper 1440 and shoot for higher fps. I'm not going bigger than a 27" monitor anyway. Instead, put more money into the CPU with a 5900x (or equivalent) and 3070 GPU. I'll also stick with 32GB ram for now.

I agree with that, I used a 32" 4K monitor for a little bit for games but that screen was way to big for the 12" my face is from the screen so I ended up going to a 27" 2K monitor. IMO a 4K screen is great with 32"+ monitors and 2K is perfect for 27".

 

[Rand]

I have both a 27" QHD LG 27GL850 (for 3 years)
and a 4k 28" Gigabyte M28U (new this year)

I would probably fork out for the 4k monitor esp if you are buying a new video card in the next couple years.
You can run a 4k monitor at 1080P in a game and it will perfectly scale as its 2x the res in each direction

for QHD the same applies but 720P

I sit about 3ft from the monitors and I find 28" is about the right size. Both work but the fidelity of 4k in games in pretty amazing.
1440p is not a hugely noticeably improvement over 1080p even though it has nearly twice the pixels.

I would highly recommend the successor to my LG if you wanted 1440p
I would also recommend the M28U for 4k I researched for a few weeks before deciding on it.. and havent been disappointed.
if you prefer 32" the M32U is also available.

OLED are just coming out but I couldnt recommend them at 1k$$$

 

[KrisZ]

IMO, but 1080p on a 28" screen will look terrible. What's the point on spending all that money and not being able to play comfortable at 4k?


1440p over 1080p is a 1.78 increase in pixel count, however 4k over 1440p is a 2.25 increase in pixel count. Hence even the fastest GPU on the market now, the RTX4090 has trouble running some latest games at native 4k, it has to use up scaling tech like DLSS.


I think going down to 1440p is a prudent move at this point. 4k monitors, despite being out for several years now are still expensive and GPU prices are only increasing. An 80 class GPU used to be able to run everything latest and greatest at the time with maxed out setting and all, not anymore.

 

[RDY4WAR]

My current monitor is an Asus MX279H which is 27", 1080p, 60 fps. Anything would be a big improvement. I just played ARK for about 2 hours and monitored fps. Flying around Fjordur on a fire wyvern, I'm at 50-60 fps on high settings minus the motion blur. It dropped to ~20 fps for a few seconds when it loaded my base in.

 

[350Rocket]

My PC has served me well for 8 years, but it's time to upgrade.

My current PC (built Spring 2015)...

Asus Z97-A mobo
Intel i5-4690k cpu
Nvidia GTX 980 gpu
G.Skill DDR3-2400 32GB ram
WD 250 GB SSD + 1TB HD
Corsair 900w psu

I can play most games on 1080p at 60 fps on high settings with a few exceptions. I'm upgrading my monitor to a 4k (3840 x 2160) monitor with 144 mhz refresh rate. Here's the upgraded build idea, reusing my psu, case, sound card, wifi card, and so forth...

x470 mobo
5800X3D cpu
RTX 3060-ti gpu
DDR4-3200 64GB ram
2TB SSD + 4TB HD

A friend suggested that since I don't care to go above 120 fps (I can't honestly tell the difference above that anyway) that the cpu is overkill, and I could go cheaper there and put more money toward a better gpu and ram like this....

x470 mobo
5600 cpu
RTX 3070 gpu
DDR4 3600 64GB ram
2TB SSD + 4TB HD

I mostly play open world strategy / objective based games like ARK:SE, GTA V, RDR2, etc... I don't really have a set budget, but not going to spend $1k on a gpu either. Any advice appreciated.

What do you think you would sell your old parts for $?