Savvy Upgrade

Altissimo · March 13, 2025

Budget (including currency): $1500 USD

Country: USA

Current PC: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/qK8FXR

A dear friend of mine is ready to upgrade his computer. His machine was my old old machine, and I've gone through an upgrade cycle since selling that computer to him back in 2016 or so.

In doing the research for his build, I started looking at Microcenter bundles, and suddenly my wallet is sweating as I think through some scenarios.

There's a big problem with my current build that is super annoying. Around the new year, I came into the possession of two Acer ED270R S3 27.0" 1920 x 1080 180 Hz Displays. They were ridiculously cheap, I couldn't say no. I already had a Dell Alienware AW3225QF 31.6" 3840 x 2160 240 Hz monitor, a LG 24GN650-B 24.0" 1920 x 1080 144 Hz monitor, and a third no-name that became my girlfriend's second monitor. Having three monitors and 4 ports, I figured, what the heck? I should be able to drive four monitors! It would be awesome!

Nope. Per this NVIDIA support page, Display Stream Compression (DSC) occupies two of the headers in my RTX 4070Ti Super, leaving just two for the remaining monitors. I tried disabling it, but the loss in quality (especially HDR) was simply not worth it. But I bought the monitors, and I wasn't going to return them. I wanted them to work.

I tried very hard to solve the problem. Eventually, I caved and bought a GT 1030 just to test if using a second GPU would solve the issue. It did, but introduced lots more problems, like DirectX getting confused and trying to split the load evenly despite my telling it not to. When the 50 series gpu's came out, I snagged an RTX 3080 for my girlfriend off Facebook marketplace and took her old 1080 and replaced the 1030 with it. That solved the problem, but...

Yes, that's right. I have 4 monitors that total 5 display headers thanks to two entire gpu's in my computer, an RTX 4070 Ti Super and a GTX 1080. Currently, the RTX 4070 Ti Super drives only the Alienware monitor, and the other 3 are driven by the 1080.

I know I'm compromising performance here, and not a small amount either. My computer idles at an uncomfortable usage of cpu and ram, somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-20% cpu and 1-2Gb of ram just to manage the windows.

Here's the real kicker. Now that I'm used to four monitors, I'm going to be really, really sad if I have to give one up.

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Now for the build. Microcenter has a nice bundle right now for a 9800X3D, and I would take the upgrades to a 870E motherboard and 64Gb of DDR5-6000 CL30 ram. Putting the parts into PC Part Picker, the bundle saves about $150 since Microcenter prices the three components bundled at just over $1000.

Problem: the ASUS X870E-E ROG Strix Gaming WiFi's second PCIe x16 slot is on the bottom edge. There's no room for my second gpu.

However, it's my understanding that the 9800X3D has integrated graphics. I have no idea how good they are.

Will my computer be more or less confused if I drive one auxiliary monitor off the integrated graphics instead of splitting the 5 across 2 gpu's? Is there any way to know how my performance will be different without spending $1000 first? I mean obviously I can return the parts if I'm not happy, but what a hassle to deconstruct, reconstruct, then deconstruct and re-reconstruct a PC.

Part of my curiosity is due to the way my NVIDIA drivers get pretty confused by having such different generations of cards in the same machine. If I had different drivers from different chipset manufacturers, would that make a difference, either positively or negatively? I've thought about swapping the 1080 for a B580, but of course they've been out of stock since I started looking.

In a perfect world, I would just get the MSI MPG X870E CARBON WIFI instead of the ASUS, since that board would fit everything just fine and we'd all be right in the world, but that's not one of the options of the bundle.

In an even more perfect world, I would get a gpu that can drive more than 4 displays. I haven't seen anything in reviews for the 9070XT about display headers, though I haven't looked very deep. I remember seeing something recently about unlimited render pipelines with respect to some piece of new hardware, but that might have been the Ryzen AI Max or the apple M4, I'm not sure. Every piece of promotional material I've seen talks about 4 displays, which makes sense given the 4 ports, but I don't know enough about HBR20 to know if my Alienware AW3225QF can operate at full resolution/refresh rate without DSC. I doubt it.

What does the party think?

Agall · March 13, 2025

2 minutes ago, Altissimo said:

However, it's my understanding that the 9800X3D has integrated graphics. I have no idea how good they are.

Practically worthless outside of moderate display adapter functions. Its 2 CUs of RDNA2. It'll run triple high resolution displays with hardware accelerated applications though, just nothing actually intensive. I've got an R5 7600 machine that runs triple higher resolution displays off the iGPU just fine as a practical example of this functioning.