Advice which card to buy

[avatar007z]

Hi all, new member here. Looking forward to be part of the virtual community (onsite communities are not currently really an option anyway) and hopefully be able to help in the near future the way i am asking for some advise now.

 

In lights of the stuff going around and the expected stagnation in the market (of all areas and not just parts) in the next months (if not even years), I want to pull the trigger on some tower updates.

 

My current config:

CPU: FX-8350 with Cooler Master MasterLiquid 240

GPU: ASUS STRIX-GTX970-DC2OC-4GD5 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 4GB

Kingston Technology HyperX FURY Blue 16GB 1866MHz DDR3

MB is Asus M5A97 Pro

Case (cooling): beQuiet Base 800 with 2 front fans and currently the back one is disconnected, due to not enough fan headers on the MB and no cable splitter (but i have the 2 fans on the AIO now, which were not there before).

PSU:Corsair CS750M (pretty much should be able to feed any GPU even with the 2 SSDs and 1 HDD in the box)

 

I have 2 Samsung s22C650 monitors and am potentially looking to get a 1440p monitor with 100 Hz or more, but probably not more than 144Hz (overclockable to 165Hz?), so i want around 100 FPS on most games.

Currently playing Shadow of the Tomb Rider, Watch Dogs, X-COM and and 2 (the new oens) and more.

 

Future plans: Cyberpunk, Doom Eternal and more and i want them at the about 100 FPS if possible. Even if not now, then with the next upgrade, which should not involve a GPU if i do the one now.

 

The rest I think is not relevant for my question, which is:

What would be the best GPU I can put in this config without bottlenecking it by the other components?

 

I am reluctant of going full blown GPU, MB, CPU, memory upgrade (no option for e.g. CPU only as it is AM3+ socket or memory only because of DDR3 vs DDR4, which leads to MB as well)

 

Even if I go overboard and get a 2080Ti to future proof (I am not saying I want to do this) will this cause more issues in the long run or it will just be quite underutilized, but otherwise no problem?

Idially i could go for something overthetop and then get the other parts upgraded later on.

 

I have watched a ton of videos on the LTT channel and others, but the information is too much to process in a short period of time and the choice is too wide.

For parts availability I need to be looking at this site (I know it is in Dutch, but i think google translating sites works quite well with this one; I am not native Dutch speaker either).

TOO MUCH CHOICES ARE ALSO A BAD THING!

 

Additional budget info: I was looking at this laptop instead of a tower update, but i think i can update the tower for half that money and i am worried about the thermals of the laptop. So I would prefer 1100 Euro tops (please consider EU prices are in some cases MUCH higher than in the US), but the lower from ithis number the better.

 

I hope I did not overdo it with the provided information, but wanted to make sure whoever has some from the top of their mind opinion has most of the factors i am toying around.

 

Thanks for the advises in advance!

[jaslion]

You've pretty much maxed out your cpu with the 970 you have now. Upgrading the 970 to something better will result in some better fps in a few games but in a lot of others nothing will change much if anything. It's pretty much time for a whole new system as this one is kinda stuck

[tdkid]

i can not help you that much as it seems to me that you are going to have to upgrade your entire system to do what you are wanting to do. and with 1100 euros as a max budget, even if you wanted to, the cheapest i found for a 2080ti is $1100 or roughly 986 euros with this being the required specs for it. 

 

650 Watt or greater power supply.****
PCI Express, PCI Express 2.0 or PCI Express 3.0 compliant motherboard with one graphics slot.
Two available 8-pin or 6+2pin PCIe power dongles
Windows 10 64bit, Windows 7 64bit

 

[KaitouX]

For ~1100 you can get something like this:

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 3.6 GHz 6-Core Processor  (€177.95 @ CD-ROM-LAND)
Motherboard: MSI B450 Gaming Plus MAX ATX AM4 Motherboard  (€104.85 @ Megekko)
Memory: G.Skill Aegis 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200 Memory  (€85.39 @ Azerty)
Video Card: KFA2 GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER 8 GB EX (1-Click OC) Video Card  (€699.00 @ CD-ROM-LAND)
Total: €1067.19
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2020-03-16 13:23 CET+0100

You can add a CPU cooler afterwards if you cant use the current one/don't like the stock, a good air cooler for ~€40 is enough for Ryzen CPUs.

 

If you don't want to use all the money you can just drop the GPU to the 2070S/2060S or 5700XT/5700 depending on how much you want to pay, just check benchmarks on Techspot, Kitguru, GamersNexus and similar sites to know how much of the performance you're losing for how much you save.

Also there's probably no GPU that will do 100FPS+ on Cyberpunk at 1440p unless you're willing to drop the settings a bit, and the 2080S can barely get over 100 avg fps on SoTR in 1440p(DXR off) so that's something you should consider. One option would be to wait for new releases if you don't want to lower your expectations(I'm doing this, but in my case it is 4K60fps and not 1440p100fps.).

[avatar007z]

Thanks for the adivice, everyone! Much appreciated!

 

yes, I though I might be at the max of CPU and this would mean a full system upgrade. My doubt was coming from the fact that during playing the GPU will almost always stay at 95-98% utilization, but CPU on the other hand will rarely go over 50%, which for me would mean that there is still room for improvement.

 

My concern with waiting is that we actually do not know if there will be new releases soon anyway.

As for 1440p@100fps, I might be willing to go to 1080p@100fps in both cases I would budget a monitor as well.

This was the reason to look at laptops as well, since if i am going to spend 1600Euro on a new build + a monitor, then i might as well get to 2000 euro and make it portable. Main concern here - thermals and there are again so many models and variance in even the same series from the same brand (including just country specifics (MSI models have e.g. NL, BE or JP at the end of their model numbers based on countries' specifics)) that just starting to make sense of those requires to build an extensive Excel sheet

 

@KaitouX Nice build indeed. I was looking at similar options half a year ago, when my MB gave up (I had ASUS M5A97 EVO R2.0 before this), but I decided the current build still has room to live. This changed now with looking how production and transport might be affected.

BTW never heard of KFA2 brand. Are those good? I would prefer to go to something well reputed and pay a bit (depends on how much is a bit) more.