A 3080 on an i7 7700 - worth it?

[jimm_eh]

Budget (including currency): $2500 CAD

Country: Canada

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: VR games, Steam etc.

Hi all,

I have an Oculus Quest 2 coming in on Tuesday, and the machine I plan to use with it is a mini-ITX build in a Thermaltake Core V1, 620w Seasonic PSU, running an i7 7700 (non K) with 16GB 2400 MHz RAM and a GTX 970.  

I can upgrade the GPU to a 1080 or 1080ti with cards I have handy.  Would it be worth buying a further GPU upgrade for this chassis?  I'm getting back into VR after a long absence (my last device was a Samsung Note 4 phone-on-face setup) and don't know yet what games I'll be playing.

If I upgrade in place, the main constraint is the card needs to be 2.2slots side or less, and shorter than 11.5 inches, to fit.  The EVGA xc3 3080 seems to be the beefiest card that will fit that spec.

I can build new (hence that budget), but I wouldn't mind saving the $ and not creating more redundancy.  The little cube is also unobtrusive in the home theater room and I'd like to keep things that way in there. #HappyWifeHappyLife

 

[Origami Cactus]

You can do that, but definitely either way, I recommend looking at SteamVR performance charts, especially frametime, and seeing how many milliseconds are caused by your cpu, and how many by gpu. 

Because by modern standards, your cpu is really weak, and that could cause problems in certain VR games. You could easily upgrade it by either 12th gen i5, or amd r5 5600, but first see how it will perform, tuesday is only 2 days away.

If you have the 1080ti at hand, yeah throw it in the case, every little bit of performance helps in vr, especially in high res headsets like quest 2.

[RONOTHAN##]

24 minutes ago, jimm_eh said:

I can upgrade the GPU to a 1080 or 1080ti with cards I have handy

If you have those cards, slap one of them in and call it a day. You don't really need much more than a 1080Ti for basically every VR game out. If performance isn't up to snuff with that card, odds are you're CPU bound and should upgrade to a 12100F or 12400F to go with the 1080 Ti. 

[Princess Luna]

38 minutes ago, jimm_eh said:

620w Seasonic PSU

I hope you don't intent to run a RTX 3080 with this thing

[jimm_eh]

1 hour ago, Princess Luna said:

I hope you don't intent to run a RTX 3080 with this thing

I did wonder about that, but I wanted to check into how big the CPU/GPU mismatch might be, before considering a PSU upgrade.  IMO if I have to think about that, I'll just build new.

[jimm_eh]

1 hour ago, RONOTHAN## said:

If you have those cards, slap one of them in and call it a day. You don't really need much more than a 1080Ti for basically every VR game out. If performance isn't up to snuff with that card, odds are you're CPU bound and should upgrade to a 12100F or 12400F to go with the 1080 Ti. 

That's one of the things I wanted to find out about as well - whether VR apps are as demanding as today's AAA titles or not.

Based on that, I'll do as you suggest and stretch my legs with the 1080ti/7700 combo first, and take it from there.