Upgrading GPU Before CPU

[maplepants]

Budget (including currency): 600-700€

Country: Germany

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Home Theatre PC; primary use is gaming with single player games like The Witcher, Tomb Raider, etc and indies. All at 1080p without HDR

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc): CPU is a Intel i5 4690k + 16GB DDR3 RAM, current GPU is a GTX 970

 

So I'm planning to upgrade my Home Theatre/Living room PC, but I'm wondering if getting the GPU first is worth it or if pairing a new GPU with my old Intel i5 4690k would handicap me too much to make it worth while.

 

So here's my main question; is it crazy to get a GTX 3070 or GTX 3080 before upgrading anything else about the machine? I don't mind not being able to tap into all the performance until the whole machine is upgraded, but I just want to know if I should expect a noticeable bump over my GTX 970 on this rig. So far I can't find any reviews which pair the new GPUs with older CPUs.

[CommanderAlex]

To answer your questions:

7 minutes ago, maplepants said:

pairing a new GPU with my old Intel i5 4690k would handicap me too much to make it worth while.

I wouldn't recommend pairing a newer GPU with a 4690k as you will be bottlenecked by the CPU, and won't get the full performance from the GPU. 

4 minutes ago, maplepants said:

Is it crazy to get a GTX 3070 or GTX 3080 before upgrading anything else about the machine?

Refer to above statement. 

 

I would go with building a whole new system using DDR4 and depending on if you're an AMD or Intel guy, a Ryzen 5 or 7 and/or Intel 10th i7 the minimum. I live in the states and don't really put together new builds but others on the forum will join in to help. 

 

[maplepants]

3 minutes ago, CommanderAlex said:

you will be bottlenecked by the CPU, and won't get the full performance from the GPU. 

How bad would the bottleneck be though? Because I do plan to upgrade the whole thing eventually, but if I can get 90% of the performance out of it using my old CPU it'd probably be worth it.  Previous LTT videos* have made the case that it's not a huge deal, but thebenchmark comparison looks pretty big.

 

Given the conflicting info here, it's hard to know how much performance I'd really be leaving on the table.

 

* Intel and AMD don’t want you to know this… (but your old computer is still fine) & Is Your Gaming Rig Being Bottlenecked??

 

[Tan3l6]

Spoiler

 

The "bottleneck percentage" depends what you play/do. In this case the "bottleneck"  would be present but if you're going to upgrade platform soon I see no problem using a high end GPU.

Also you need a good PSU.

 

 

[CommanderAlex]

1 minute ago, maplepants said:

How bad would the bottleneck be though? Because I do plan to upgrade the whole thing eventually, but if I can get 90% of the performance out of it using my old CPU it'd probably be worth it.  Previous LTT videos* have made the case that it's not a huge deal, but the benchmark comparison looks pretty big.

 

Given the conflicting info here, it's hard to know how much performance I'd really be leaving on the table.

 

* Intel and AMD don’t want you to know this… (but your old computer is still fine) & Is Your Gaming Rig Being Bottlenecked??

 

In newer games when I had a 1070 and my 4790k at 4.7Ghz, I would max out my CPU utilization, giving up 10-30 fps on the table due to the CPU bottleneck. 

[BetteBalterZen]

If you play at 1080p, you will have a huge bottleneck with a 3070 or 3080.