Hey, everyone.
Despite the repeated "community forum that <I> should totally join," I joined today. First post, long time watcher.
I'm about to build my wife a new gaming PC. RTX, other happy stuff. Her old system hands down to my son, which means he has as good as system as I do. I'm trying to allay my envy.
Bottom line: Should I upgrade my GTX970 to the GTX1660TI?
My Use Case
I'm a casual gamer, mostly MMOs (currently Elder Scrolls Online) and some Cities: Skylines. I rarely dip a toe into first-person - Doom, Wolfenstein, Everspace - but not online. I play at 1440p. I am aiming particularly to maximize ESO. My 970 does reasonably well with mostly high settings, AA off, distances at ~60-70%. I see rare/occasional frame drops and stutter which I attribute to loading textures not already resident in the framebuffer, along with texture loss or late arrivals, i.e. smooth or drawn well inside the draw distance.
My System
I run an I5 6600k at 4.4GHz on an MSI Z170 motherboard. I can run 4.5GHz without issue, I pulled back for longevity. No success with bclk, however. Even at stock multiplier the only stable part of my system with just a 100-->101 bump is that I stably crash. every. single. time.
My MSI 970 is overclocked, 105% power, +150 core, +300 memory. I get artifacts and texture loss in ESO if I push memory much higher, although other games cope with up to +500. Thermals won't support sustaining much over +150 on the core. I'm sure there's a little room in both, but not enough to fight over it. (I know, I know, sacrilege.)
I use a non-gaming monitor - a Samsung CH711 27-inch 1800R curve display. Nothing special, but it's bright, brilliant, and does support FreeSync - up to 60hz anyway.
Back to the GTX1660TI
So, yeah, I'm looking at the GTX1660TI. I know ESO will still see framerates limited by the engine and, thus, CPU. Still, I see a couple advantages. First, I get the additional 2GB memory, which can only help with keeping ahead of textures and rendering, particularly at 1440p. I also get more horsepower, which should help with view distances and allow me to max settings.
I also get the side benefit of freeing up the GTX970 to move the 970 to a Linux workstation I built on a Ryzen 3 2200G that's still running the integrated Vega. Really not necessary, but welcome, but I do have it set up with 2GB of memory reserved, which I could return to the system.
If you got this far, congrats. I aimed to get my word count average high in my first post. I now leave this in your capable, and patient, hands.
