I put a $3000 GPU in my Average PC... It Was a Mistake

[LMGcommunity]

What should you do with your hard-earned upgrade bucks? Drop every penny into the biggest, best video card money can buy? Invest in a more modest GPU to leave room for other upgrades? How will we get the most for our money?

 

 

[emosun]

I'm pretty convinced every tech youtuber secretly agreed behind closed doors to never ever say "every computer has a bottleneck". Just to torture the forum members with a flood of "how do I eliminate bottlenecks" posts.

[Lurick]

7 minutes ago, emosun said:

I'm pretty convinced every tech youtuber secretly agreed behind closed doors to never ever say "every computer has a bottleneck". Just to torture the forum members with a flood of "how do I eliminate bottlenecks" posts.

DoEs My RTX 5090 bOtTlEnEcK mY i5-2400?!?!?!

[ZiggyGamma]

I don't know how to feel that they pretty much showed my PC as the Average PC. The only difference is I have 16GB of VRAM and another 2 TBs of SSD

[emosun]

3 minutes ago, ZiggyGamma said:

I don't know how to feel that they pretty much showed my PC as the Average PC. The only difference is I have 16GB of VRAM and another 2 TBs of SSD

if your pc is average and you don't feel one way or the other....... then you feel exactly what you should be feeling which is average.

[ZiggyGamma]

1 minute ago, emosun said:

if your pc is average and you don't feel one way or the other....... then you feel exactly what you should be feeling which is average.

Touche

[Haswellx86]

Why these mediocre videos again.

 

You could have also tested upgrading the 12400 to a 13/14600K and even overclock it and could have gotten a lot more performance than swapping outright to a 9800X3D. I mean if then, what even if the point of the video? By a new faster PC?

[nhand42]

+1 upgrade the monitor instead of the GPU. I recently upgraded to an OLED ultrawide. I'm running the same FPS as before but with faster pixel response and deeper blacks and brighter colors. It's an upgrade I didn't even know I needed. The GPU upgrade would have been twice as expensive and far less impressive.

The only downside is now I can never go back to LCD.

[RejZoR]

It's important to tell people HOW to upgrade the monitor. They make a common mistake of buying cheap 4K monitor because everyone is raging about 4K for TV's and they end up having to power that cheap 4K display with crappy RTX 2060 that they have. Meanwhile I've always lagged behind in displays and always had superb performance because of it. I've been on 1080p for ages and only went with 1440p few years ago (I've had RTX 3080 back then already). I'm on RX 9070 XT and while I did upgrade my monitor to OLED, I'm still on 1440p and I'm not planning on going anywhere with this. And I don't plan on going with 4K for 5+ years guaranteed.

 

Most important is to play upgrades smart and make good balance of components for the bottleneck reasons. I've only experienced this once in my life when I upgraded my prehistoric system of Celeron 333MHz, 64MB RAM and S3 Savage3D 8MB to GeForce 2 MX 32MB. While performance uplift was massive for most games, some games like Quake 3 Arena didn't see the real benefits because the CPU was so crap. I've later bought Athlon 1 GHz paired with GeForce 2 Pro and the difference was absolutely massive. Granted, graphic card was also faster, but so was CPU which was the fastest you could buy back then and was the first to hit 1GHz. It actually wasn't stupendously expensive like it is now. None of it and I know coz I was never loaded with money.

[nhand42]

18 hours ago, RejZoR said:

 It actually wasn't stupendously expensive like it is now. None of it and I know coz I was never loaded with money.

Amen to that. I upgraded to a Radeon HD 6950 back in early 2010s and remember hesitating because the sale price was $250. That was crazy expensive for a graphics card back then. Almost 25% of the system price! But back then I assumed that was the worst it was going to get.

I was so naive.

[Bramimond]

On 6/24/2025 at 5:27 AM, nhand42 said:

upgraded to an OLED

As long as OLED still means burn-in I can't justify the cost for something that might last two, maybe five years, when my current screen is 15 years old. 

 

..and I don't want to hide my task bar. Hiding the task bar sucks and the screen is on at least 14h each day, so OLED just doesn't make sense. Been meaning to upgrade my screen for years now, but can't find anything decent in the 42"-48" range.