CPU Upgrade vs 1080ti?

[hat]

As much as I'm rooting for AMD and like the Ryzen platform, I can't see why all the R5 recommendations are floating around. It's around Broadwell in performance per clock, which we all know isn't a major step up from Ivy Bridge. The biggest improvement would probably come from faster DDR4 ram. Is it worth investing in a whole new platform? Probably not. On that note, OP can ramp up his 3570k and possibly bump his ram up to 1866, but that's another can of worms.

 

[JalleR]

Find a used I7 3770K OC and then the 1080TI....

 

[BlackAzrael]

Agreed, £700+ is an obscene amount of money to spend on a graphics card. While I could afford it, I wouldn't be comfortable doing so unless I had a very solid need for a 1080 Ti, which I don't. Selling the 970s will help a fair bit, though.

@BlackAzrael I recommend a 1080 Ti if you wanna hit that high 144Hz framerate more reliably and get away from the issues of SLI. While your CPU will hold it back to some extent, especially in The Witcher, even the latest 7700K overclocked to over 4GHz will do so - check TPU's review, so don't let that put you off too much. What it will do, is help the lowest framerates. As soon as you can, I think you should upgrade that CPU to a 7700K and overclock it.

Personally, I think you'll be fine with a 1080 which will save you a wad of cash that you could spend towards a CPU upgrade.

I'm aware the 1080ti is pretty darn expensive especially with the Canadian dollar being so weak compared to the USD but I had thought about the 1080 when it came out and it seems to have pretty similar performances to a 970 sli setup from the benchmarks I had seen. Hence why I thought the 1080ti would be a better choice.

I think what I am going to end up doing is see how OCing my current cpu goes and depending just upgrade the mobo+cpu+ram. Also, any OC guide or Z270/Z170 mobos (preferably not Asus, had bad experiences with them) recommendations?

i only could find that witcher does not scale much above 4 cores:
http://www.pcgameshardware.de/The-W...fikkarten-Benchmarks-1159196/galerie/2376257/
http://www.techspot.com/review/1006-the-witcher-3-benchmarks/page5.html

do ya have nv hairworks on?
from wizzard review:
NVIDIA Hairworks is turned off because it comes at a huge performance hit with very little benefit.

And yes I have Hairworks always on at max, I have mods for it so yeah.

Honestly when going for the 1080Ti you have to have a pretty badass system. If you really wanna do it, you will need to OC at least to 5GHz and still have some (but very minute) bottlenecking. The best solution would be to go i7. I know this makes no sense and I am no fan of i7s for gaming but that card was made for 4K, which makes it hard for me not to think of i7 to run it without bottlenecking anything. The Ryzens will do a great job too, but atm, they are not so well optimized and may lead to slowdowns, especially on 1080p.

Given what I said above, I would advice going with the 1080Ti. Try to OC the CPU as much as you can, and if possible the RAM too. You will minimize any bottlenecking this way. Keep in mind that you will have no SLI issues and the 1080Ti will play much much better than the 2x970s you have rn.

No SLI issues would be a nice thing, I have had my fair share of problems with it, nothing major but still annoying.

I was thinking of going for an i7 vs an i5 this time if only for the hyper-threading

 

[bug]

Let's put it this way: 1080Ti is overkill if you play in FHD. Witcher 3 doesn't even need 144Hz, it's not that fast paced.

And if you decide to upgrade your CPU, I think you need to give Ryzen motherboards a bit of time to mature and let AMD fix the memory limitation first.

 

[hapkiman]

You could keep the rest of your rig and look for a used i7 3770k, and then go for the 1080Ti.

 

[hat]

If SLI problems are bugging you and you got the dosh, maybe the 1080Ti would be good for you. It's the strongest single card solution available. I prefer a strong single card over two weaker cards myself. That said, I still see no reason to move away from the 3570k. Not unless you spring for an entire system overhaul and hope you end up with a Kaby chip that hits 5GHz, and you get Bitchin' Fast™ DDR4.

 

[Frag_Maniac]

Only reason I recommended both, is anyone with enough to get a new 1080 Ti, will probably realize within a year they can afford a 1440p or 4k display.

 

[Caring1]

If you can't find a cheap i7-3770K then look for a Xeon E3-1270 V2 or a E3-1280 V2.
If they are compatible with your board.

 

[trog100]

if gaming is your thing you will see a far better performance increase form upgrading your gpu than your cpu.. i cant seem to see the logic in the go for the cpu first argument.. not unless you intend to upgrade both within a short space of time.. then it dosnt matter which way you do it..

trog

 

[BlackAzrael]

So I've done some OC testing and am now at 4.2GHz. OCCT, cinebench and standard Intel Burn Test all ran fine for about 10-15 mins each, but prime95 crashed after a little over 30 minutes. It just said "Prime95 application stopped working" So I guess that's an instability? Max temperature was 80C and it was hovering between 75C-78C most of the time.

The only things I've changed for OCing is the multiplier to 42 and the vcore to static 1.200v. I haven't touched anything else including TurboBoost.
Also, I had tried 43 multiplier with 1.205v before the 4.2GHz and it just BSOD all the time after windows starts, restarted 3 times, it even locked up in the BIOS once.

Any tips?

 

[eidairaman1]

Back the OC off

 

[Beastie]

Overkill vs overkill @ 1080.
Personally I'd go for a higher resolution monitor.

 

[MrGenius]

The only things I've changed for OCing is the multiplier to 42 and the vcore to static 1.200v. I haven't touched anything else including TurboBoost.
Also, I had tried 43 multiplier with 1.205v before the 4.2GHz and it just BSOD all the time after windows starts, restarted 3 times, it even locked up in the BIOS once.

Any tips?

You should be able to get 4.5-4.6GHz on air no problem. You just need to keep adjusting your voltages to get it stable. Not just the vcore. 1.2V is still pretty low. You've got lots of room to work with there. But you'll probably need to tweak some other voltages too. It's pretty difficult to give you an idea what your particular chip needs to do what. You need to google an ivy bridge or 3570K OC guide and start experimenting proper. Because I can pretty much guarantee you can get 4.5-4.6GHz minimum with a little time and effort put in. Likely a little higher even.

To give you a rough idea where to start my 3570K does 4.3GHz stable with:

CPU core = 1.1760V
CPU IO = 1.0500V
CPU SA = .9400V
CPU PLL = 1.5000V

I have to set the vcore to 1.1950V to get 1.1760V. And I have all my BIOS OC settings maxed out. CPU core Vdroop offset control +100%, Internal PLL overvoltage enabled, digital compensation level high, CPU core OCP expander enhanced, CPU core switching frequency 2x, EIST+C1E+C-state all disabled, enhanced turbo enabled(forces all 4 cores to run at the same speed). I've had 2 3570Ks. The first one did 5.0GHz stable, the one I have know does 4.8GHz stable. Both on water(just small 120mm water though). But the first one did 4.7GHz stable on air too(before I switched to water).

 

[MxPhenom 216]

1080ti for sure. CPU should be fine for a couple more years. Hell clock it too 4.5 and thatll be even better for the future.

 

[eidairaman1]

1080ti for sure. CPU should be fine for a couple more years. Hell clock it too 4.5 and thatll be even better for the future.

He is having instability at 4.2GHz

 

[BlackAzrael]

So I don't know if I should really pursue this OCing anyway. I ran Prime95 again right after I posted and it BSOD'ed like 15 minutes in. It did help a little bit with the Witcher 3 but the boost is pretty minimal, like a couple FPSes maybe. It did help matching the load between CPU and GPU though but nothing really astonishing. In the past two hours I dropped it down to 4.0GHz and ran Prime95 for 2 hours and it was fine at max 77C so I might just leave it there and be content with that, I don't feel comfortable risking more to be honest. All these different voltages you can increase or decrease has me a little overwhelmed and confused even after reading a guide and watching some video tutorials.

I think I might just go the 1080ti route afterall if I didn't damage my CPU hopefully.

Also, I am really not sure why some of you keep saying that a card like this is overkill at 1080p. Funny enough, I was told the same thing when picking up my 970s and there are still some games I can't max out at a constant 60fps. Besides, I prefer having higher FPS than higher resolution, though I never tried higher except with DSR. I just don't really want to change my monitor that I bought only a year ago already.

 

[eidairaman1]

You havent damaged the cpu

 

[MrGenius]

Bah. 4.0GHz isn't even a real OC in my book. I get 4.2GHz just by hitting the OC Genie button on my mobo. No real effort required. You're giving up too easy. Gimme that thing and let me show you how it's done.

 

[BlackAzrael]

Bah. 4.0GHz isn't even a real OC in my book. I get 4.2GHz just by hitting the OC Genie button on my mobo. No real effort required. You're giving up too easy. Gimme that thing and let me show you how it's done.

Yeah I know it's not much but whatever, even when I was at 4.2GHz, it wasn't giving me that much more performance, at least for that one game anyway. Maybe I am, but I just don't really feel comfortable with it. I'll just wait and see for the aftermarket 1080 ti's, even then I might just keep my current rig afterall.

 

[DiogoCDS19]

Also, I am really not sure why some of you keep saying that a card like this is overkill at 1080p. Funny enough, I was told the same thing when picking up my 970s and there are still some games I can't max out at a constant 60fps. Besides, I prefer having higher FPS than higher resolution, though I never tried higher except with DSR. I just don't really want to change my monitor that I bought only a year ago already.

Yup, for most people is ok to play at 40-50 fps.
For me, only over 60 fps is acceptable, but thats me. When I want to play under 60 fps I go play on the PS4.
When your in doubt check benchmarks for like 5-10 games at the resolution you play then take conclusions.

 

[trog100]

to get very good 1080 gaming performance from a 1080TI gpu dosnt need the latest generation cpu.. the one you have even at 4.0ghz will do fine..

god help noobs who read threads like this one..

trog

 

[basco]

i think the decision was made in his mind before and if you have the money go for the 1080ti-its that simple.
you could get 10+fps from deactivating hairworks(but i understand that you want all eye candy) and more when you optimize sli with nvidia inspector.

and for me too update way is: first graphiccard then cpu

 

[Kanan]

So I don't know if I should really pursue this OCing anyway. I ran Prime95 again right after I posted and it BSOD'ed like 15 minutes in. It did help a little bit with the Witcher 3 but the boost is pretty minimal, like a couple FPSes maybe. It did help matching the load between CPU and GPU though but nothing really astonishing. In the past two hours I dropped it down to 4.0GHz and ran Prime95 for 2 hours and it was fine at max 77C so I might just leave it there and be content with that, I don't feel comfortable risking more to be honest. All these different voltages you can increase or decrease has me a little overwhelmed and confused even after reading a guide and watching some video tutorials.

I think I might just go the 1080ti route afterall if I didn't damage my CPU hopefully.

Also, I am really not sure why some of you keep saying that a card like this is overkill at 1080p. Funny enough, I was told the same thing when picking up my 970s and there are still some games I can't max out at a constant 60fps. Besides, I prefer having higher FPS than higher resolution, though I never tried higher except with DSR. I just don't really want to change my monitor that I bought only a year ago already.

First of all, when OCing:

Go for auto voltage and try to overclock the chip via multiplicator as far as possible. It has to be Blend stable in Prime (not Small FFT), remember that too. That said, 3570K is a good overclocker, but not as good as 2500/2600K was, because it isn't soldered. But certainly a good overclock should be possible to maintain.

Second, if you couldn't get a 60 FPS with 970 in SLI you had a lot of other problems, but the problems weren't the GPUs. SLI not working for example, extremely high settings, or a bad coded game - but certainly 970 SLI is overkill for 1080p as well as for 99% of games. 970 SLI is ~ Titan X / 980 Ti OC in performance, and that means it's well suited for 1440p.

That also means a 1080 TI is total overkill for 1080p, it's a 1440p/high Hz or 4K GPU, nothing less than that. And no sense in debating it further, there are more than enough benchmarks on the net that proof what I say.

So to come to an conclusion: you can stay with that relatively slow 3570K for a while, but be sure that it will eventually and in some demanding games like BF1 limit your GPU, if you go for the 1080 Ti. In the end, you have to replace the CPU as well, because you want a *balanced system*. And now that Ryzen is so nice, seeing more and more good news, I'd simply go for a Ryzen 7 1700 + a ASUS board and some high clocked Ram (3200 or higher) that is explicitely marked as Ryzen memory.

I hope you don't ignore my post again. I hate to waste my time.

 

[BlackAzrael]

First of all, when OCing:

Go for auto voltage and try to overclock the chip via multiplicator as far as possible. It has to be Blend stable in Prime (not Small FFT), remember that too. That said, 3570K is a good overclocker, but not as good as 2500/2600K was, because it isn't soldered. But certainly a good overclock should be possible to maintain.

Second, if you couldn't get a 60 FPS with 970 in SLI you had a lot of other problems, but the problems weren't the GPUs. SLI not working for example, extremely high settings, or a bad coded game - but certainly 970 SLI is overkill for 1080p as well as for 99% of games. 970 SLI is ~ Titan X / 980 Ti OC in performance, and that means it's well suited for 1440p.

That also means a 1080 TI is total overkill for 1080p, it's a 1440p/high Hz or 4K GPU, nothing less than that. And no sense in debating it further, there are more than enough benchmarks on the net that proof what I say.

So to come to an conclusion: you can stay with that relatively slow 3570K for a while, but be sure that it will eventually and in some demanding games like BF1 limit your GPU, if you go for the 1080 Ti. In the end, you have to replace the CPU as well, because you want a *balanced system*. And now that Ryzen is so nice, seeing more and more good news, I'd simply go for a Ryzen 7 1700 + a ASUS board and some high clocked Ram (3200 or higher) that is explicitely marked as Ryzen memory.

I hope you don't ignore my post again. I hate to waste my time.

Alright first of all, I have read your posts as well, I wasn't ignoring anyone. You really don't need to be a dick about it, if you think you are wasting your time posting this then why even post?

Second it's funny you talk about auto voltage and multiplicator because apart from keeping the vcore at fixed rate (which I'm not even sure works because it doesn't stay fixed in hwmonitor or even occt), that is EXACTLY what I did. I upped the multiplier slowly, and it started giving me instability at 4.2GHz.

Third, your definition of overkill may differ from someone else's. See, perhaps you prefer a higher resolution vs higher stable framerate, I prefer the latter. And as I said, changing the monitor I paid for only after a year is a waste in my opinion. I am content with that monitor for now, if I ever do want to change it then yes in that case I will most likely go the 1440p route this time.

I absolutely agree that I should have a "balanced system" as you put it, I had the cpu upgrade in mind even when I bought my 970s. Hence why, I am hesitating between the two still, it's definitely not something I will make a quick decision about.

As for Ryzen 7 1700, it does seem like an interesting option, though I never went with an AMD cpu, and my experience with Radeon gpus have been quite horrible to say the least, same with Asus motherboards for that matter. I've personally always run with Gigabyte for that component.

 

[Mussels]

1080ti will be just fine with an overclocked 3570k, if my 3770k can feed a GTX1080 with room to spare at 4k, you'll be just fine.