Want to upgrade GPU but CPU and ram will probably bottleneck

[Nickexp]

So basically I currently have an i5-4460 processor (which apparently I cannot overclock) and 8gb of RAM on an ASUS H997M-E motherboard. I almost have enough to get a GTX 1080 Ti once the non-founders edition ones come out (assuming they're below $1200), but I think my CPU and memory will bottleneck it significantly, and it'll cost me a further $1206 to upgrade my motherboard, CPU (with a seperate cooler) and ram to the setup I wish to get. Any ideas on what I should do? Will I be badly bottlenecked?

 

I mostly just want my VR to perform better for the moment until I can afford to upgrade the other components since I can only get the 1080 ti since I got like 5x the amount of money I expected for my birthday which made me only like $300 away.

[Fredrikmikael]

You are correct on one thing, and that is that you are not able to overclock the CPU as it isn't a "K" / unlocked processor.

But that processor is still a beast in regards to gaming! The word bottleneck is seriously over exaggerated.

The fact of the matter is that the CPU will not bring any significant bottleneck in regards to gaming or regular use cases.

The newest i5 and the i5 you have now doesn't really bring anything more to the table in any use case that would be remotely relevant to you (i'm assuming).

The upgrades of each CPU generation is depressingly insignificant, and you will probably be able to have that CPU for several years to come before it will become a bottleneck.

Most people waste a lot of money on upgrading CPU's that are relatively new in regards to CPU's because of them being uneducated or unknowledgeable in the area.

Upgrading you CPU to the newest i5 or i7 would MAYBE give you 5% more fps. To put that in a relevant context:

In a game you would be getting 60fps in now you would get 63fps by wasting an unjustifiable amount of money on a 'new' CPU.

 

For the love of god save your money!

 

EDIT: We have started getting to a point where 8GB can be somewhat low in a few titles. Especially in regards to most people running a few browser tabs in the background, maybe discord/skype, spotify/itunes etc..

So installing another stick or two of ram would be easily justifiable! 

[VVoltor]

Just get it, it's going to be a massive improvement to your current setup.

Then later maybe drop in a faster CPU or an extra 8gb ram.

 

People are always whining about 'bottlenecking', which is a rather misleading term, like in your case it just means you won't get the absolute full potential out of your card, but it's not like it'll be capped, it's still going to be faster then a 1070 or 1080.

For a new build those specs would be a little unbalanced, but sometimes you just want to upgrade 1 part at the time and the 1080ti will certainly last you long enough to upgrade the rest of the system before it's obsolete.

[Droidbot]

3 minutes ago, Fredrikmikael said:

Upgrading you CPU to the newest i5 or i7 would MAYBE give you 5% more fps. To put that in a relevant context:

In a game you would be getting 60fps in now you would get 63fps by wasting an unjustifiable amount of money on a 'new' CPU.

i5, yes. i7, no. Most games these days love cores and threads and people oftentimes see 30+ FPS boosts even with the same GPU/RAM. Plus Haswell Xeons are just slightly lower clocked i7s with ECC support, and they go for like $240 a piece.

 

OP, you can buy a Xeon E3 and fit it on that motherboard perfectly fine and get similar performance to a locked 4770 or 4790 for $240. http://pcpartpicker.com/product/vkxfrH/intel-cpu-bx80646e31240v3

[Fredrikmikael]

6 minutes ago, Droidbot said:

i5, yes. i7, no. Most games these days love cores and threads and people oftentimes see 30+ FPS boosts even with the same GPU/RAM. Plus Haswell Xeons are just slightly lower clocked i7s with ECC support, and they go for like $240 a piece.

 

OP, you can buy a Xeon E3 and fit it on that motherboard perfectly fine and get similar performance to a locked 4770 or 4790 for $240. http://pcpartpicker.com/product/vkxfrH/intel-cpu-bx80646e31240v3

ALL games are limited by the current API's, i am not aware of a single game able to utilize / spreading the load over more than 4 cores. The majority of the titles are spreading 90% of the load between 2 cores.

The only thing here that is relevant to the gaming performance is clock speed.

 

But the load spreading problem might not be a reality when the big guys start actually implementing DX12 in their game engines / develop new game engines.

But even then we have yet to see what the improvement will look like. As of now we only have theoretical percentages given by microsoft.

[Droidbot]

Just now, Fredrikmikael said:

ALL games are limited by the current API's, i am not aware of a single game able to utilize / spreading the load over more than 4 cores. The majority of the titles are spreading 90% of the load between 2 cores.

The only thing here that is relevant to the gaming performance is clock speed.

 

But the load spreading problem might not be a reality when the big guys start actually implementing it in their game engines / develop new game engines.

But even then we have yet to see what the improvement will look like. As of now we only have theoretical percentages given by microsoft.

Oh, trust me, a lot of games can. 

Watch Dogs 2 for example takes advantage of every core and thread you chuck at it, but also is fine with quads with high clocks. 

 

 

All of these tests were done on a Titan X Pascal, the Witcher test is a serious stress as most people see 30-50fps less in Novigrad compared to other parts of the game with bad processors.

[Nickexp]

20 minutes ago, VVoltor said:

Just get it, it's going to be a massive improvement to your current setup.

Then later maybe drop in a faster CPU or an extra 8gb ram.

 

People are always whining about 'bottlenecking', which is a rather misleading term, like in your case it just means you won't get the absolute full potential out of your card, but it's not like it'll be capped, it's still going to be faster then a 1070 or 1080.

For a new build those specs would be a little unbalanced, but sometimes you just want to upgrade 1 part at the time and the 1080ti will certainly last you long enough to upgrade the rest of the system before it's obsolete.

Good to know, I was worried my CPU would hold me back because atm I know something is but I suspect it to be the ram given that it gets pushed pretty far in a lot of games. That and my CPU is below the minimum spec for VR as it is and 3.2GHz didn't seem like enough.

[Suika]

Awhile back, I took my 5930k, disabled a couple cores, hyperthreading, and underclocking to 3GHz all while running a 980 Ti with a 1440p monitor and decided to run a stress test in GTA V.

 

 

Needless to say, if you aren't playing at 4K, you'll see reduced performance. Now I'm not going to argue spending $450 on a new CPU and motherboard is a wise choice... like, at all, but it's something to keep mind of if you decide to pick up the 1080 Ti, you will encounter bottlenecks caused by your CPU. 

 

And honestly, I usually make the argument to upgrade the graphics card first, and then see what kind of a CPU bottleneck you'll be facing. Because regardless, in most titles, you won't be that affected, and worst case you can just run higher graphically dependent settings but still hit 60FPS.

[Nickexp]

34 minutes ago, Droidbot said:

i5, yes. i7, no. Most games these days love cores and threads and people oftentimes see 30+ FPS boosts even with the same GPU/RAM. Plus Haswell Xeons are just slightly lower clocked i7s with ECC support, and they go for like $240 a piece.

 

OP, you can buy a Xeon E3 and fit it on that motherboard perfectly fine and get similar performance to a locked 4770 or 4790 for $240. http://pcpartpicker.com/product/vkxfrH/intel-cpu-bx80646e31240v3

Getting a Zeon just means I'll have to get an i7 later one and have spent $400 on a temporary CPU that I'll need a new motherboard for anyway (you can't get the one you linked very easily in Australia, our retailers are dicks and stop selling older versions as soon as newer ones come out)

[Nickexp]

1 minute ago, Suika said:

Awhile back, I took my 5930k, disabled a couple cores, hyperthreading, and underclocking to 3GHz all while running a 980 Ti with a 1440p monitor and decided to run a stress test in GTA V.

 

 

Needless to say, if you aren't playing at 4K, you'll see reduced performance. Now I'm not going to argue spending $450 on a new CPU and motherboard is a wise choice... like, at all, but it's something to keep mind of if you decide to pick up the 1080 Ti, you will encounter bottlenecks caused by your CPU. 

 

And honestly, I usually make the argument to upgrade the graphics card first, and then see what kind of a CPU bottleneck you'll be facing. Because regardless, in most titles, you won't be that affected, and worst case you can just run higher graphically dependent settings but still hit 60FPS.

Lol it's definitely more than $450 for a new motherboard and CPU in Australia, plus I'd need DDR4 memory to replace the DDR3 I have right now

[Droidbot]

1 minute ago, Nickexp said:

Getting a Zeon just means I'll have to get an i7 later one and have spent $400 on a temporary CPU that I'll need a new motherboard for anyway (you can't get the one you linked very easily in Australia, our retailers are dicks and stop selling older versions as soon as newer ones come out)

Why? just keep your current architecture and get the xeon, you won't see noticable gains from going from xeon > 7700/k

and I know, I live in australia. It's $379 at Mwave, save $200 by getting the 1080ti through amazon once stock stabilises. 

[Suika]

Just now, Nickexp said:

Lol it's definitely more than $450 for a new motherboard and CPU in Australia, plus I'd need DDR4 memory to replace the DDR3 I have right now

Oh, right, Australia. 

 

Regardless, I don't think it's a bad idea to pick up the 1080 Ti. Once you have it, you can weigh out if it's truly worth it to upgrade your CPU by watching total GPU usage while in game.

[Nickexp]

1 minute ago, Suika said:

Oh, right, Australia. 

 

Regardless, I don't think it's a bad idea to pick up the 1080 Ti. Once you have it, you can weigh out if it's truly worth it to upgrade your CPU by watching total GPU usage while in game.

Yeah, I think I'll do that. I should be able to get a few hundred dollars off of the 1080 ti from my brother since he gets employee discounts at Harvey Norman (so he gets stuff at cost price) and for whatever reason they've begun selling GPUs on their own.

[JoostinOnline]

What @Droidbot said.  You don't have to move to a whole new architecture.  I have an i7-4790K, and it remains one of the highest end consumer processors on the market.  You can get pretty close to the latest and greatest without changing generations.  You'll only need a new motherboard if you want to overclock, and don't already have a Z series one.

[GTBTK]

On my i7-2600, i can overclock +4 multipliers above stock and run the BCLK at 105.8 for a Turbo clock speed of 4.4Ghz.

 

You have an asus motherboard, why not try the automatic overclocking utility in the bios and see what it does for you? You may find that you get a bit of extra performance from your CPU. Those utilities usually add too much voltage but you can review and reduce that after it is finished. The auto utility only took my CPU up to a 103Mhz bclk but I have manually tuned it up another 200Mhz and it is still stable.

 

Running a 1080Ti in that rig will be restricted compared to say a 7700K but it will still be significantly better than what you are using now.

 

You always have the option to upgrade the motherboard/CPU and Ram in 6-12 months time and transfer the Graphics card across

 

 

[Devansh Kumar]

Yeah upgraing to 16Gigs of ram would be nice but processor is fine as it is

 

[Nickexp]

Just realised I forgot to say, I'm currently using a GTX 970 lol

[Denni5m]

Most games are GPU bound unless it's a old game like CS or something like that, but almost every quality game made in the last 3 years will be GPU bound. So upgrading a CPU doesn't really yield much results if you have a 6 core or above. You would be better off in your case even with a 4 core (because it's not that old) to spend the extra money on a better video card. 

I know from experience recently I had a 11 year old i7 that still ran games fine and after upgrading to a new CPU and MB it only made a minor increase and that was a 11 year old CPU.