Upgrading a three year old system

[TomRay74]

Hi,

 

My younger brother just pinged me and asked for my recommendations for either buying a new PC or upgrading his old one.

He currently has a Asus Z97-P Socket 1150 motherboard with the Intel Core i7-4790 (not K) with 8GB RAM and a Geforce 970.

 

My first instinct was that the CPU (Quad Core running at 3.6Ghz) would still be sufficient for current (and upcoming?) games and that he would be better off investing in a M.2 PCIe SSD for the system partition (he currently only has a single HDD for everything) and wait for the 11xx Nvidia cards to drop and catch a used 1070 ti when that happens, thus postponing the upgrade of the CPU/MB/RAM.

 

Or will the CPU be a bottleneck for something like the 1070 ti?

 

I am suddenly not so confident giving this advice. Feel free to point out my mistakes.

 

Best regards,

 

Tom Reiertsen

[orbitalbuzzsaw]

Hold on to the CPU, get more RAM, an SSD if it doesn't have one, and a new GPU (1070 or Ti)

[thedude4bides]

The SSD will make a big difference for sure.  Upgrade the RAM to 16gb.  Even if the 1070ti could be bottlenecked in some CPU intensive games he still could get better performance than currently getting.  The big plus in these upgrades is that they can all transfer to anew build when he upgrades CPU/Mobo.

[Dryden]

Yeah SSD

 

About RAM... I don't like mixing RAM. it can be a hit or miss resulting in a stable system.  If he can get really cheap DDR3... same speed, timings, even same brand as current RAM, then maybe go that route.

 

Just wondering.. has your bro noticed any performance problems with his current system that would prompt upgrades/new build??

 

Has he tried backing up his personal files and doing a clean install of OS... wiping everything, fresh OS?