Upgrading my system

[Genezi1]

Hello, friends! I have a choice to make which turns out to be harder than expected. I have a pc which is built 9 years ago. Currently i am trying to upgrade it and since i don't have the enough budget to go for a mb/cpu/ram combination i want to take it step by step. The motherboard is asrock z97 with the lga 1150 socket with i7-4790 on it. The gpu that i am currently using is gtx 960. I want to upgrade the gpu to achieve a little bit better overall performance in games. I looked up some second hand gpu's and the ones fitting in my budget are 1070ti and 1660 and anything below that. The problem is that i used some kind of bottleneck calculator and with those two specific gpu's i will get around 25% bottleneck from the cpu. Can you give me some advice about which gpu should i use, could be something else, even AMD to pair the cpu and gpu with pretty much no bottleneck but still better performance. 

[ChrisLoudon]

5 minutes ago, Genezi1 said:

Can you give me some advice about which gpu should i use

Hi buddy,

 

While a bottleneck calculator can be useful, it really comes down to what works for you. Do you have a small list of games that you intend on playing and what kind of frame rate are you looking to achieve? Chances are someone here will have a working system with a similar spec and might be able to give you an idea of what you can expect in a 'real-world' example.

 

I would also say that the bottleneck calculators don't factor in every scenario.

 

A 1080ti for example is still a tasty GPU and while might struggle with newer AAA titles, can still chomp through frames at 1080p and even 1440p (I have one paired with a 6700k) and it still works for me in certain games without issue.

 

The bottleneck that most people are concerned about is when pushing higher frame rates at lower resolutions as this is where a lower powered CPU tends to struggle. You can usually overcome this (or at least minimise the bottleneck) but increasing the resolution and or in-game graphics settings so you are closer to being GPU limited.

 

While you are likely to get a load of different opinions on this (all will be very valid), I tend to 'brute-force' a system into submission and am more than happy to whack in GPU that's maybe more powerful than would normally be intended for with regards to the rest of the platform.

 

I do this fairly frequently given I tend to shell out on the latets Nvidia GPU every 2 years BUT only bother upgrading my core platform every 4 or so years.

[venomtail]

"Bottleneck" is a boogeyman of a word too often feared and used. There will always be a bottleneck. There are system out there that are a bottleneck for a 4090 and some where the 4090 is the bottleneck.

 

GTX 960 is old. Get something like a used RX5700XT. They should be cheap enough to not ruin your wallet and give you enough breathing room to push graphical prettyness even if FPS might be held back.

[Imakuni]

1 hour ago, Genezi1 said:

Hello, friends! I have a choice to make which turns out to be harder than expected. I have a pc which is built 9 years ago. Currently i am trying to upgrade it and since i don't have the enough budget to go for a mb/cpu/ram combination i want to take it step by step. The motherboard is asrock z97 with the lga 1150 socket with i7-4790 on it. The gpu that i am currently using is gtx 960. I want to upgrade the gpu to achieve a little bit better overall performance in games. I looked up some second hand gpu's and the ones fitting in my budget are 1070ti and 1660 and anything below that. The problem is that i used some kind of bottleneck calculator and with those two specific gpu's i will get around 25% bottleneck from the cpu. Can you give me some advice about which gpu should i use, could be something else, even AMD to pair the cpu and gpu with pretty much no bottleneck but still better performance. 

First advice: ignore this bottleneck "calculator" BS. From what you said, the way you go about upgradind is simple, just dump all the cash onto a better GPU.

 

As to which, your first order of business is putting your 960 for sale to get a couple extra bucks. It's not going to be much, but it'll make a big difference, so unless you plan to reuse it somewhere else, start by getting rid of your current card. With that done, hunt for a used Rtx 3060 or 3060ti; ignore the 10xx series, they are too old to recommend, and avoid the 16xx / 20xx ones if you can. Alternatively, an Rx 7600 would work well, but I doubt you'll find it for as good a price as a 3060/3060ti.