2019 Hephaestus upgrade!

[Jonathan W]

So probably none of you will remember but I did an amatuer build log showcasing my build of my "ultimate" budget gaming rig. Hephaestus. A ZOTAC 980 AMP, 16GB of T-Force RAM, an i5 6600K at 4.3GHz constant in an In-Win 303 case on an ASUS Maximus Hero 9 board....That was about 2 or 3 years ago and my GPU is about 7 years old now. But at 2560x1080p this rig has kept me going strong at 144Hz pretty much Ultra settings for everything. 

But then I played the ANTHEM demo...

 

I was getting barely over 70 frames with everything set to about High details. Granted the game was gorgeous but the super open world games like it, Far Cry 5, sometimes even Warframe, Destiny 2 on rare occasion, Just Cause 2, pretty much anything I do in VR that tries to be a AAA title, I haven't tried Witcher 3 yet but I assume that'll be hard to play and etc. Also just going through what games I want in the future... Metro Exodus, Rage 2, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Tom Clancy's The Division 2, etc...

 

So TL:DR, I want to up my system. I'm planning on buying a 2080, non-ti, when my tax returns come in and then transitioning my 980 into my Ryzen build. But I wanna know the best CPU/RAM upgrades I can do for my dollar. I REALLY don't want to have to buy a whole new board because I already have several perfectly good motherboards sitting on a shelf not being used because they're old and it annoys the shite out of me. 

 

btw if it helps both my GPU and CPU are often pinned at 100% usage while gaming. Included pic is about a half hour into the Anthem demo

Edited January 29, 2019 by Jonathan W

[brob]

If you don't want to change the motherboard you could upgrade the cpu to an i7-7700K.