When do you upgrade your monitor?

[restless]

Hi there

I don't use my rig every day. I just watch a movie sometimes or play a game if I find one that excites me (currently it's the Witcher 3).

I'm not crazy about FPS, screen resolution or response time. I'm happy with 1080p and 30 FPS and I don't think I could even tell if the response time is kinda bad as long as it's not terrible.

Thus, I like to upgrade my PC iteratively and only if I really need to. My current specs are as follows:

 

However, my GTX 980 used to be called dead. I got it from a friend and I managed to revive it but it crashes as soon as it needs to get some harder work done so I'm thinking about getting a new GPU (Something in the realms from a 1080 to a 2070).
My monitor is even older than the rest of my rig. It is a Asus VK266H (1920x1200, 60Hz, contrast 20'000:1, 16,7M colors). I'm fine with it but I sometimes feel like the blacks don't really look black and the colors look a bit washed out, but I don't know much about monitors and I don't have anything to compare it with but the OLED screen of my S10 (that looks way better obviously).

My question is:
When do you think it's time to upgrade a monitor? Does my monitor effectively decrease my experience when watching a movie or play the next AAA game or do I just miss out on the pixel density of 4K?
I understand this is a very subjective topic but I'm interested what you guys think.

- restless 

[Stormseeker9]

If you buy a new GPU like thoSe mentioned, you’ll also need a new cpu. It will bottleneck I assume 

[MojangYang]

If you are happy with 1080p and 30 FPS then DON’T get one of those high end gpus. Completely useless. You will need to get a new pc is you want 1080 or 2070, or the bottleneck will kill you. If you only do what you are are doing with your pc currently, i doubt you neeed to change anything

[WereCatf]

27 minutes ago, restless said:

When do you think it's time to upgrade a monitor? Does my monitor effectively decrease my experience when watching a movie or play the next AAA game or do I just miss out on the pixel density of 4K?

Your display is about the same age as mine. Personally, I think it's high time to upgrade by now -- depending on the display you upgraded to, you could get higher resolution and/or better colour-representation and/or higher frequency. What you feel is important to you, however, is up to your taste.

 

Me, I would upgrade to a 2160p VA-panel, if I could afford it. I don't care about high refresh-rates, 60Hz would be perfectly fine with me, but I would certainly appreciate higher resolution and better colours. What's holding me back is...well, my wallet. VA-panels are fucking expensive.

[xreaperx22]

yeah a 2070 heck even the 1080 is a bit much for just 1080p,but if your gonna get a gpu anyways you may as well get a nice 2k monitor and run 1440p its the sweet spot if you ask me.

[Stormseeker9]

As for panel, go with a 1440p 144hz screen. Thank me later

[restless]

I never ran in any CPU issues yet so my plan was to upgrade the GPU first because my 980 keeps crashing (although I would be perfectly fine with a working 980...).
I am aware that I'd run into a CPU bottleneck, but that way I could postpone upgrading my mainboard until I really need more CPU power...

 

I will try to get my eyes on some 1440p panels (and see if I can see the higher refresh rate as well). Too bad it's difficult to compare without bringing my old monitor with me 

[restless]

Hi guys

Thanks for your feedback. However, I got a bit triggered by the CPU bottlenecking comments.
To me, it often seems like gamers love to casually argue that CPU's will bottleneck with modern GPUs, so I did some digging and found this video by JayzTwoCents:

He shows how there is very little bottlenecking with a GTX 1080 and a Pentium G4560 @ 1080p,

 

while Linus shows the same (0-11 FPS difference) with a GTX 1060 and a Ryzen 3 1300X @ 1080p

 

Edit: Here a test with my 3770K and a GTX 1070. Also, almost no bottlenecking:

 

So I still don't really understand why I should upgrade my CPU socket (which would cost me more than a used 1080) just for a minor performance difference.

I will happily look into any comparable real life scenario benchmarks if you have any at hand. (I am not talking about CPU-bound applications. Of course there would be bottlenecking).

That said, I understood from your comments that a 1080 is overpowered for playing at 1080p, so I might just get a new GTX980 and upgrade my rig as soon as I run in any issues.

 

For the monitor, I tweaked my settings a bit and I'm quiet happy with the colors now. I'll still compare it with a better monitor when I get the chance.