Nehalem + GTX 1080 = ok?

[A84Gamer]

So I did a little research and found my answer... kind of.

Which brings me here for your advice.

 

It's about that time that I'm thinking of buying a new GPU to replace my GTX 750 Ti, and I thought to myself, what if I just went balls to the wall and bought a 1080. Not that I'll actually go through with that kind of purchase, but academically, I'm just curious if my system could even utilize it's full power or if would be a waste of money.  My first concern was my Asus P6T Deluxe V2 because of its PCI-E 2.0 slot. 

 

Below is a link to an article I found that basically said the way PCI-E scaling works, even if I use a 16x 2.0 slot, there will be around 1-2% of a performance drop at most which really isn't noticeable.

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_1080_PCI_Express_Scaling/

 

However, here's where I get a little worried.  The article pointed out that the findings were based on systems running Sandy Bridge or newer.

I'm running Nehalem.

 

So what do you think, would a GTX 1080 be a dumb purchase if paired with the Nehalem based Core i7-920?

[Syntaxvgm]

overclock the balls out of it if you got the right cooler, it can still game well. 

 

BUT

why not get a 1070 and focus on saving for a new platform? 

[themctipers]

1080 -> cpu upgrade, please.

 

[Deli]

Goes balls to the wall and get a Titan XP, and enjoy it with a Pentium CPU. Yeah baby....

[RadiatingLight]

I would go 1070 and i5 6500 (or 7500) like @Syntaxvgm suggested

[Syntaxvgm]

1 minute ago, RadiatingLight said:

I would go 1070 and i5 6500 (or 7500) like @Syntaxvgm suggested

Truth be told the board, cpu, and 16GiB of memory cost less than my 1080 for my 5820k setup I think. 

[RadiatingLight]

1 minute ago, Syntaxvgm said:

Truth be told the board, cpu, and 16GiB of memory cost less than my 1080 for my 5820k setup I think. 

It's about $300 for a 6500, H110 motherboard, and 16GB of ram, which is about the price difference between a 1070 and 1080

[Deli]

2 minutes ago, Syntaxvgm said:

Truth be told the board, cpu, and 16GiB of memory cost less than my 1080 for my 5820k setup I think. 

But you can find a 1080 for around $600 now.

[Streetguru]

15 minutes ago, A84Gamer said:

 

What is your display set up? do you already have a 4k display to try and power or something?

Please don't tell me you were thinking of buying a 1080 with only a 1080p 60hz display

 

anyways it'll bottleneck to be sure should still be over 60fps in a lot of cases though, probably worth upgrading at this point for gaming anyways

[Syntaxvgm]

Just now, RadiatingLight said:

It's about $300 for a 6500, H110 motherboard, and 16GB of ram, which is about the price difference between a 1070 and 1080

persoanlly I'm in the "get an i7 if you're gonna get a high end gpu" camp, but yea this is good too.Some time ago I had a sany i7 that outperformed my friend's haswell i5 a lot when doing things like watching twitch on one screen and gaming on the other when we had the same gpu. OFC twitch used to be fuckin flash. 

[Syntaxvgm]

3 minutes ago, Deli said:

But you can find a 1080 for around $600 now.

Just added my board, memory, and cpu and it came to 661. I bought a 1080 close to launch, as soon as I could get my hands on a non-founders, and haven't looked at the price since. 

[RadiatingLight]

1 minute ago, Syntaxvgm said:

persoanlly I'm in the "get an i7 if you're gonna get a high end gpu" camp, but yea this is good too.Some time ago I had a sany i7 that outperformed my friend's haswell i5 a lot when doing things like watching twitch on one screen and gaming on the other when we had the same gpu. OFC twitch used to be fuckin flash. 

But sandy is much better than Nehalem IIRC

6500 is going to be better than what he has right now, and the updated chipset will be nice to have, and an i5 wont bottleneck, so although it may feel nice to put the i7 sticker on your case, it's not going to give a huge benefit.

[Apollo Refugio]

just upgrade your whole system, $600-700 can do wonders

[Syntaxvgm]

3 minutes ago, RadiatingLight said:

But sandy is much better than Nehalem IIRC

6500 is going to be better than what he has right now, and the updated chipset will be nice to have, and an i5 wont bottleneck, so although it may feel nice to put the i7 sticker on your case, it's not going to give a huge benefit.

Quote

sany i7 that outperformed my friend's haswell i5 

I'm saying worth it over a new i5. Really there's nothing wrong with getting an i5, but if you're considering 1080 and shit, go for 8 threads. I've found newer games really benefit from it, especially games like battlefield and shit. Multitasking is nice too. I often run stuff alongside games. No it's not like game changing or anything, but it's nice. I consider a 1070 or 1080 to constitute a high end setup. 

[Syntaxvgm]

6 minutes ago, Apollo Refugio said:

just upgrade your whole system, $600-700 can do wonders

fuck if he wanted to go this route, get a used 970 for well less than 200 on ebay and get a really nice system all around. A 970 is still great and is the most common gpu on steam hardware survey, and upgrade to something high end next generation/1080ti or whatever. My 970 in my workstation still runs games on 3 screens at decent settings. Massive upgrade from a 750ti

 

here's the first one I saw 

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Asus-StRIX-GTX-970-4GB-DDR5-OC-Edition-VERY-FAST-SHIPPING-/162351045330

 

[RadiatingLight]

hey @A84Gamer can you tell us your monitor resolution and refresh rate?

[Streetguru]

2 minutes ago, Syntaxvgm said:

 

For me anyways, it doesn't make sense to go from 8 threads to 4 threads in just about any case

 

minimum fps is what a more modern CPU is really going to help with



http://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/2744-intel-i7-7700k-review-and-benchmark/page-6

[Streetguru]

4 minutes ago, Syntaxvgm said:

 

better off with a 480 for around $200 though

[Syntaxvgm]

2 minutes ago, Streetguru said:

For me anyways, it doesn't make sense to go from 8 threads to 4 threads in just about any case

 

minimum fps is what a more modern CPU is really going to help with



http://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/2744-intel-i7-7700k-review-and-benchmark/page-6

going from a 2600 non-k to a 5820k in my gaming pc ONLY saw me a great increase because I'm running my 5820k at 4.5Ghz. The ipc gains are pretty pathetic really, even though they do stack up gen after gen, it's not as good as some put it. 

[Deli]

16 minutes ago, RadiatingLight said:

hey @A84Gamer can you tell us your monitor resolution and refresh rate?

Unless he upgrades his monitor recently. 4K and high refresh rate monitor weren't common two years ago. And he's still rocking a 750 Ti. I doubt he's using 4K or 144Hz monitor.

[Lotus]

My roomate is running my old rig (i7-920 @ 3.9 GHz, R9 270) and decided he wanted better performance. Without asking me, he just went and bought a GTX 1070, and it doesn't hit a bottleneck in most games. I probably wouldn't go for a 1080 because at that point you'd likely get a better experience spending the extra cash replacing the platform, but a 1070 doesn't appear that bad of a pairing, provided you've got a very high overclock. Nehalem on stock speeds would definitely be a no-go.

 

45 minutes ago, RadiatingLight said:

But sandy is much better than Nehalem IIRC

Sandy had much higher stock clocks and was also much easier to overclock because it was unlocked. Nehalem/Westmere were all locked (except the $1k+ i7-990x chips), but could be overclocked via BCLK. It's just most people didn't know how or couldn't be bothered to do it since it's not as straitforward and you have to change many different variables to actually hit the high overclocks. They're not that different in performance once they're both at their peak TBH. i7-920's stock frequency is 2.66 GHz, but I've got mine running at 3.9 GHz. That's a massive gain that most people didn't do, and most chips hit 4.0+ (mine can, but I only have a 212 Evo for the cooler so I'm stuck at 1.27v).

[Princess Luna]

You haven't mentioned your resolution that does count a lot on which GPU you are aiming at, anything 1440p and below you should go with a GTX 1070 and anything higher than that with the GTX 1080, the CPU isn't bad by any means, it's just old... if you buy a GTX 1080 you'll be able to later update to either RyZen or Kaby Lake and still use this GPU fully... but if your resolution is like 1080p the same is true about the GTX 1070

[A84Gamer]

My monitor is a Dell 3007WFP-HC

Here's a link to the spec sheet.

http://www.dell.com/downloads/emea/general/ultrasharp 3007wfp-hc_en.pdf

So according to this, Max resolution of 2560x1600 at 60 Hz.