How much of a "New Build" do I really need to do to boost the performance of my current gaming PC?

[Kirt]

Budget (including currency): $1200 - $1500

Country: USA

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Games/Sims - MSFS 2020, Digital Combat Simulator   Work(Rendering, 3D Design, CADD) - Twinmotion, 3DS Max/VRay, Revit, AutoCAD

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): Existing PC is a Lenovo Legion T730 gaming PC with i9-9900k CPU, 32GB memory, and a RTX 2070 graphics card.

 

I purchased this PC as a mid-to-beefy gaming platform about eighteen months ago (in retrospect, maybe should have built my own at that time?). Just a few months after getting this rig to game/sim on, COVID hit and this quickly became my home office render/CADD platform as well.

 

During the subsequent year or so I have come to the conclusion that both my gaming frame rates and my render times while working - along with stress on the hardware -  could and should be reduced substantially with some judicious replacement of key hardware. A little initial research somewhat convinced me that if I could switch out the graphics card with perhaps a 3080 or the soon to be released 3080 Ti - I could get the performance improvements I would like for a reasonable price. I realize the difficulty you face just obtaining the graphics card, but I am also wondering if I should be ditching some other components as well - even swapping out the motherboard, case, and memory, power supply, etc.

 

I would like to replace as much as I need to substantially boost performance, but what would make the most sense to change and what could I keep to upgrade this PC and not blow my budget? Assuming I can get a graphics card somewhere at less than $1000 (maybe less than $1200 for a Ti card), what would make sense to replace on this rig? I realize I might need to spend a bit more, especially if I can resell my 2070 card after I am able to sideline it.

 

Thanks for any advice!

 

 

 

[curiousmind34]

32GB of memory is probably enough and it's not worth it yet getting a whole new motherboard to get a faster cpu, so if you want to upgrade those I would wait for ddr5/AM5 to come out (likely late this year or early next year). If you can find one, a 3080/3080ti  would be a significant upgrade

[Moonzy]

If you're looking to boost gaming performance

A 3080 is pretty much the option you can go for for most games.

 

Though I would argue that you already have a good enough rig to not really need an upgrade, but that's my opinion and if you think otherwise then that's fine, your standards may be higher than mine

 

As to what to upgrade overall, a good guide is to keep msi afterburner open in background when you're doing your tasks, and whenever you feel like you aren't happy with the performance, look at the graphs in afterburner and see GPU and individual CPU thread usage, see what's limiting you

[Lairlair]

Yeah I feel like the most significant change you can make to render faster will be to upgrade your graphics card. Prices are high but it also mean you can sell your 2070 for a good price too, so all in all you might be okay. You could change other components like the motherboard / CPU but it's more going to be a headache than anything imo