An upgrade delayed.

ArrowThief · November 21, 2020

My system is rather old. I'm rocking a 6700k that I upgraded to from a 6600k that I bought back when having 14nm was considered fancy. You could also buy the new parts after they came out! (2015)

as for a GPU I have a GTX 980ti, also very fancy in its day.
Both are super outdated and I know its time to upgrade, so I had planned to do a from scratch new build once we moved to DDR5. For two reasons, to give me time to save a large chunk of cash and because its fun to be on the cutting edge every decade or so.

For the time being, I game on a 3440x1440 Ultrawide and because of that I can scrape by with my 6700k, but the 980ti just can't keep up (its very sad to have a 100hz monitor that rarely gets above 40hz). So I had planned to go ahead and get a rtx 3080 to enjoy playable framerates and just merge that into the new system once I get there.

All of that said, I can't get one of those. So I was considering just getting a secondhand 2070S or something like that to scrape by till I do my full system rebuild.

My logic is that with AMD (FINALLY) being competitive in the GPU scene we might see much faster and more competitively pried GPUs from AMD and Nvidia within a year or so. So waiting till next year to drop $800 on a GPU might make my money go much further than it would in this years GPUs. Nvidia is already rumored to be releasing a 3080s/ti and prices are going to shift a bit once you can actually buy the cards easily. So if I could get a 2070s for $300ish that might pay off in the long run.

Lastly, I am hoping to play cyberpunk at semi reasonable framerate and I have two weeks of vacation for Christmas... So a card before then would be really nice.

What do you guys think? Should I wait till I can buy a 3080? Or would it be better to get a much newer but second hand GPU to tide me over for another year?

full system specs:
CPU - Intel 6700k (oc 4.5ghz)

RAM - 16gb 2400mhz

GPU - EVGA GTX 980ti (175Mhz(CPU) and 500Mhz(RAM) OC)

Mobo - ASrock z170 Extreme4

PSU - 650W (Yes I know I need to replace this for either of the new cards)

System drive - 256gb SATA ssd (In 2015 this was good!)

Storage - 4x 3TB drives in raid 1+0 (love that cost to speed and Redundancy ratio)

Exeon · November 21, 2020

Wow, it seems like we got exactly the same build.

I also got a 6700K OC'd at 4.5Ghz and a EVGA 980TI, bought them near launch, and I recently switched to a 3440x1440 setup as well

I currently have the 9600K as my motherboard broke down a year or so ago and decided to replace the CPU as well.

The 980TI doesn't handle 2,5K well, I understand your pain, I feel like the card is dying since I swapped monitors.

As far as recomendations go, I'm in your situation and I wouldn't wait for more upcoming releases.

Sure there might be a "fancy" 3080TI coming "at some point" but who knows when you can actually buy and get one.

You could look to get that 2070s for 300$ if you can't wait, but otherwise I'd just buy whatever comes in stock first, rather than waiting for newer stuff to release.

There will always be something newer around the corner

ArrowThief · November 21, 2020

You're not wrong, There will always be something better in a year. It would be so much easier If it was possible to buy new hardware so I could be sure that when I have time to play new games I will have the hardware to do it with, but I guess that's everyone's problem this year.
Thanks for your input.