How well does a 4090 or 4080 perform on X99/5820K system?

[Rorre]

Here's my take from an owner of a Broadwell-E system i7-6950X, I'd buy a 6950X (again) and overclock the hell out of it. Hopefully you have a good X99 motherboard with the latest Bios to do so, install a Noctua NH D15S CPU air-cooler, and an NVME 512GB boot drive. With turbo boost you should be able to overclock (to the extreme) select individual cores (from within your bios settings) up to 4 cores of the 10 cores available, I think. Some newer 4 X 8GB sticks DDR4 3600Mhz Corsair Vengeance memory also helps to achieve a significant improvement of the CPU overclock.
Your i7-5820K is really no better than an i7 3960X (top of the Sandy Bridge-E hierarchy). A move from the i7-5960X, top of the Haswell-E, (you have the lowest of the Haswell-E) to the i7-6950X (top of the Broadwell-E) gives two more cores at the same frequency, a 3 to 5 ipc improvement, giving about 25% more performance. So likely a 40% improvement from your i7-5820k before overclocking.
I believe that the top overclocked Broadwell-E on a good X99 system could support an RTX4080 or the up and coming RTX4070ti quite handily at 1440p without bottlenecking. These upgrades listed along with quad channel memory will provide quite a versatile HEDT suitable for gaming, machine learning, deep learning, and scientific processing tasks. The only caveat is that a used i7-6950X still commands a hefty price on eBay, somewhere around 400-500 USD, and 1000+ NIB. Baring these upgrades, you may as well buy a whole new system, preferably i7-13700k with a Z790 motherboard and DDR5 memory, which would likely keep you satisfied for 4 or 5 years.
Resizable Bar requires 10th generation or later Intel CPU's
FWIW good luck.

 

[ThrashZone]

For X99 the fastest CPU is a 5960X. 4.7GHz overclocks are common on decently binned ones. They do get hot under loads though. I have another 6950X I was recently given to play with but haven't completed the build yet. The best I've gotten out of one is 4.4GHz and it ran a lot warmer than any of my 5960X's. I didn't have all of the Arctic Liquid Freezer II's I now have back then though so maybe a 360 with better fans in push/pull will help with cooling it at sane levels.

Hi,
There are lots of assumptions about what the op expectations are and bottleneck this and that

All I see is "I feel it is the time to upgrade my 6 years old 1080, but I do not want to upgrade the whole system" and what is he going to upgrade to 1440/ 4k ? are monitors part of the upgrade 4k sure isn't going to happen and I'm not sure 1440 is worth the costs either
But thinking for 40 series is blowing the budget already

40 series major issue atm is stupid prices, someone else brought up the "global economy" and past mining, well does that now mean 1200-1600.us minimum is a great deal and snatch one or two up quickly lol

Best thing atm is look for a 30 series gpu if he want to upgrade or wait for 40 series prices to drop.

I've never use a Xeon and have no idea if they can be oc'ed or even used on the op's board but gaming usually does need a bump in core/ cache/ memory clocks just to smooth out if issues arise

Bottom line all games have recommended and minimal spec's to play
As long as his existing chips qualifies I'm not buying into all the existing cpu/... bottle necking stuff as a huge issue for the op, only issue is really jumping on 40 series atm.

As long as games are fluid it's all that matters and x99 is more than capable still.

 

[Rorre]

That will bottleneck the cpu by upgrading to the 4080 or 4090. Save up and get an i9-13900K, plus a new motherboard with lga 1700 and z790, get at least 3200Mhz ddr4 as well. In fact, just save up and upgrade the entire pc and make a new rig. Don't waste money on a gpu that will bottleneck like crazy.

Perhaps DDR5 instead for the z790 may work better…

 

[dgianstefani]

Hi,
There are lots of assumptions about what the op expectations are and bottleneck this and that

All I see is "I feel it is the time to upgrade my 6 years old 1080, but I do not want to upgrade the whole system" and what is he going to upgrade to 1440/ 4k ? are monitors part of the upgrade 4k sure isn't going to happen and I'm not sure 1440 is worth the costs either
But thinking for 40 series is blowing the budget already

There's no assumptions. We just don't give bad advice.

Upgrading the 6 year old GPU on a system with an 8 year old CPU based on a 9 year old architecture is bad advice. He's using 144 Hz monitors and won't get anywhere near that with a 5820K.

He would get a more noticeable improvement from a $250 switch to a 5600/AM4 platform than a $2000+ switch to a RTX 4090 while keeping the rest of his system.

Now imagine a $550 switch to 13600K/Z790 DDR4 and a $1200 4080. More than twice the single core performance and almost 4x the multicore. 3x the GPU performance (that can now actually be used because it won't be CPU limited most of the time).

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi,
Fantasy upgrade numbers are the issue
Should of stuck with your first response with the "IF" arguments because this last one is pure fantasy

If your plan is to get a 4080/90 and upgrade the rest of the system later - fine.

If your plan is to spend all your upgrade money on GPU - not worth it.


CPU is very important for RT games.

 

[dgianstefani]

Hi,
Fantasy upgrade numbers are the issue
Should of stuck with your first response with the "IF" arguments because this last one is pure fantasy

"fantasy"

 

[ThrashZone]

"fantasy"

Hi,
Yeah fantasy upgrade alternate hardware prices bud.

Clearly you have missed the fact op does not want to upgrade the entire system.
He might be open to a cheap Xeon for his existing x99 board though.
Only one that makes sense to me though would be a 5960x used of course and might be a hair more than 100.us.

 

[dgianstefani]

Hi,
Yeah fantasy upgrade alternate hardware prices bud.

Clearly you have missed the fact op does not want to upgrade the entire system.
He might be open to a cheap Xeon for his existing x99 board though.
Only one that makes sense to me though would be a 5960x used of course and might be a hair more than 100.us.

There's nothing fantasy about the upgrade prices I used "bud".
OP raised the question of upgrading to a 4090 or 4080, therefore his upgrade budget is $1.2k-2k USD, since that is the current price range for those GPUs.
If you want to make accusations of fantasy pricing on that, or on some of the suggested upgrade paths, provide evidence or keep your comments to yourself.

As explained, a cheap xeon will do nothing for gaming performance, as adding more, slow cores for any amount of money won't make any difference to FPS, since he's limited by the speed of the cores, not the amount. The fact it's cheap and has a bigger number is irrelevant.

Obviously posters such as yourself will go along with preferences that are most likely rooted in a misunderstanding of the problem, despite the end result being bad advice that would lead to a absurdly unbalanced system, even if he used a previous gen card like a 3080. OP has poor framerates in games and probably thinks a slow GPU is to blame. He spent thousands on his very high end system a long time ago and probably thinks replacing it will cost a similar amount. This is not the case.

The responsibility of the people giving advice is to give good advice, not to pretend the only options that make sense are the ones OP originally thought of.

The overwhelming majority of people replying to OP understand these concepts. Meanwhile you are suggesting he buy a 3090ti, because the 15% faster and 40% more efficient 4080 is "overpriced" despite it being approximately the same price.

Haswell-e has good cache clocking ability so it games pretty well and with quad channel memory to so a 4080 would do just fine if it were around 8-900.us it would be a decent combo
12 threads is no slouch just needs a little bump in core & cache clocks.

Lmao.

 

[Toothless]

Hi,
Yeah fantasy upgrade alternate hardware prices bud.

Clearly you have missed the fact op does not want to upgrade the entire system.
He might be open to a cheap Xeon for his existing x99 board though.
Only one that makes sense to me though would be a 5960x used of course and might be a hair more than 100.us.

Dude quit spewing bad advice.

I have an overclocked 6900k right now and the performance will NOT keep up with a 4080. All a Xeon will do is be locked and lower clocked and NOT help in gaming at all.

You really, really need to stop.

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi,
Seriously guys and gals
A gpu at stock settings
Games at default settings
Turn off rt nonsense and the op's existing system is fine as is so get real and not tie your gaming expectations to him which looks like he's in Iraq.

I didn't suggest a Xeon lol but the person that did is not included in your accusations of posting bad advise this people is priceless

40 series is 3-400.us overpriced so bad purchase period.

 

[Toothless]

Hi,
Seriously guys and gals
A gpu at stock settings
Games at default settings
Turn off rt nonsense and the op's existing system is fine as is so get real and not tie your gaming expectations to him which looks like he's in Iraq.

I didn't suggest a Xeon lol but the person that did is not included in your accusations of posting bad advise this people is priceless

40 series is 3-400.us overpriced so bad purchase period.

Yeah and I told them that Xeons aren't going to help, nicely. I'm going to just ignore the rest of the thread before I get points again for calling out your continuous bad advice streaks.

OP, if you can, aim for a 3070 or 6700XT range til you upgrade. Plenty of good advice has been said and some of those x99 boards catch good prices on the used market. Might be time to upgrade.

 

[bobbybluz]

Hi,
Yeah fantasy upgrade alternate hardware prices bud.

Clearly you have missed the fact op does not want to upgrade the entire system.
He might be open to a cheap Xeon for his existing x99 board though.
Only one that makes sense to me though would be a 5960x used of course and might be a hair more than 100.us.

There are a handful of used 5960X's on Ebay for under $70 at the moment. There was a fully functional 6950X on there yesterday for $158 that's gone now. There are some for $200. Cooling an OC'd 5960X or 6950X could be problematic, especially a 6950X. I've been adventuring with X99 since it first came out and have built several rigs for A/V production. Counting the build I currently have in progress I have 6 X99 PC's of my own. Three are in use, two are stashed away for parts and one is about half completed (I do have everything on hand to finish it).

For the $$$ a 5960X will give the highest overclock speeds and eight cores. Memory limit is 64GB. Under load they run warm. My experiences with 6950X's have proven them to be not worth the money over a 5960X, all things considered. While you do get two more cores and the ability to run 128GB of RAM the heat penalty and lower OC speeds don't make them worth considering at this point in time. Since Xeons have locked multipliers plus V3's are limited to DDR4 2133 and V4's limited to DDR4 2400 (BLCK at 103.5 is what I use) for daily use they're a far better value. My in progress new X99 build is getting a pristine used EVGA GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 11GB I paid $207 for off Ebay. While I could have bought any GPU I felt like getting that was the limit for this project. I do have a RX 6800 XT and a RX 6900 XT in my Alder Lake builds though.

I'm relating my own personal hands-on experiences with X99. For OP I'd stick a 5960X in what he has and leave the rest as is for gaming use. For doing things with graphics an E5 2683 V4 is perfect. Other than that build something with current generation parts and get the most out of an expensive GPU.

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi,
Making stuff up that tends to happen because you're misreading or understanding what I wright badly

I said 30 series long ago but that is bad advice because I didn't throw the baby out with the bath water with the op's entire system lol
But you say it and it's all of a sudden all good, yes they made many different 30 series gpu's obviously and yes market should be checked for all 30 series deals duh

Probably get another wild hair saying 20 series are cheaper to lol

 

[Dr. Dro]

There are a handful of used 5960X's on Ebay for under $70 at the moment. There was a fully functional 6950X on there yesterday for $158 that's gone now. There are some for $200. Cooling an OC'd 5960X or 6950X could be problematic, especially a 6950X. I've been adventuring with X99 since it first came out and have built several rigs for A/V production. Counting the build I currently have in progress I have 6 X99 PC's of my own. Three are in use, two are stashed away for parts and one is about half completed (I do have everything on hand to finish it).

For the $$$ a 5960X will give the highest overclock speeds and eight cores. Memory limit is 64GB. Under load they run warm. My experiences with 6950X's have proven them to be not worth the money over a 5960X, all things considered. While you do get two more cores and the ability to run 128GB of RAM the heat penalty and lower OC speeds don't make them worth considering at this point in time. Since Xeons have locked multipliers plus V3's are limited to DDR4 2133 and V4's limited to DDR4 2400 (BLCK at 103.5 is what I use) for daily use they're a far better value. My in progress new X99 build is getting a pristine used EVGA GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 11GB I paid $207 for off Ebay. While I could have bought any GPU I felt like getting that was the limit for this project. I do have a RX 6800 XT and a RX 6900 XT in my Alder Lake builds though.

I'm relating my own personal hands-on experiences with X99. For OP I'd stick a 5960X in what he has and leave the rest as is for gaming use. For doing things with graphics an E5 2683 V4 is perfect. Other than that build something with current generation parts and get the most out of an expensive GPU.

They can and will run more than 64 GB of RAM without difficulty. Ran as high as 80 GB on mine (with 4x 16 and 4x 4 GB sticks) for a test, but with 8x 32 GB sticks they should run up to 256 GB without much difficulty, particularly since Haswell is designed to run with DDR4-2133 memory. Sure you can push 3000-3200 on a i7 without much difficulty, but if you aim for the generational spec, that is your target - and what Xeons such as mine run at. CL9 though!

My X99 build from 2017 is all but revived at this point, but all I have for it is a GT 710. I intended to put my 3090 in it once I upgraded to the Radeon, but more and more it looks like I should just sell this 3090, buy the 7900 XTX for my build and see if I can score an older GPU. More efficient use of resources ($) that way. I will not have a Broadwell i7 for it just yet, my E5-4669 v3 is fine for what I need it to do, despite the low clock speed. Anyway, you can find i7-6950Xs as low as $120 on eBay nowadays. This is historical hardware at this point, it no longer has the performance or holds the value it once had.

For OP: Buy an RTX 3060 Ti and don't look back. That's about as fast as you can push on X99 without major bottlenecks.

 

[Rorre]

They can and will run more than 64 GB of RAM without difficulty. Ran as high as 80 GB on mine (with 4x 16 and 4x 4 GB sticks) for a test, but with 8x 32 GB sticks they should run up to 256 GB without much difficulty, particularly since Haswell is designed to run with DDR4-2133 memory. Sure you can push 3000-3200 on a i7 without much difficulty, but if you aim for the generational spec, that is your target - and what Xeons such as mine run at. CL9 though!

My X99 build from 2017 is all but revived at this point, but all I have for it is a GT 710. I intended to put my 3090 in it once I upgraded to the Radeon, but more and more it looks like I should just sell this 3090, buy the 7900 XTX for my build and see if I can score an older GPU. More efficient use of resources ($) that way. I will not have a Broadwell i7 for it just yet, my E5-4669 v3 is fine for what I need it to do, despite the low clock speed. Anyway, you can find i7-6950Xs as low as $120 on eBay nowadays. This is historical hardware at this point, it no longer has the performance or holds the value it once had.

For OP: Buy an RTX 3060 Ti and don't look back. That's about as fast as you can push on X99 without major bottlenecks.

$120? Not likely .Just checked eBay start at $200 from China and probably wait 2-3 months. In north America they are $350-$1400 and get it within a week or so.

 

[johnspack]

5820k should be able to do 4.8 easy, I could. It should also be able to do 4.2+ cache. Crank those up. Don't leave cache at 3ghz.
Still not enough for a 4090, but still fun!

 

[Dr. Dro]

$120? Not likely .Just checked eBay start at $200 from China and probably wait 2-3 months. In north America they are $350-$1400 and get it within a week or so.

Yeah I saw them for 120 a couple of months back. Regret not buying...

 

[bobbybluz]

Here's a 6950X for $200 from a place about 45 minutes from where I live. I bought my E5 2699 V4 from them a couple of years ago. A 5960X is still the way to go and for a lot less money. More lanes and cores than a 5820K, more cores than a 5930K plus overclocking and cooling is the same depending on the luck of the CPU lottery.
Intel Core i7-6950X 3.00GHz 25MB 10-Core LGA2011-3 | eBay

 

[dgianstefani]

Here's a 6950X for $200 from a place about 45 minutes from where I live. I bought my E5 2699 V4 from them a couple of years ago. A 5960X is still the way to go and for a lot less money. More lanes and cores than a 5820K, more cores than a 5930K plus overclocking and cooling is the same depending on the luck of the CPU lottery.
Intel Core i7-6950X 3.00GHz 25MB 10-Core LGA2011-3 | eBay

Complete and utter waste of money that would make zero difference in gaming. Beaten by a modern cpu with half the cores.

Single thread rating 60% of a $120 i3. Stop recommending 8 year old cpus as worthy of any amount of money.

 

[Rorre]

Here's a 6950X for $200 from a place about 45 minutes from where I live. I bought my E5 2699 V4 from them a couple of years ago. A 5960X is still the way to go and for a lot less money. More lanes and cores than a 5820K, more cores than a 5930K plus overclocking and cooling is the same depending on the luck of the CPU lottery.
Intel Core i7-6950X 3.00GHz 25MB 10-Core LGA2011-3 | eBay

Thanks for that. I’m in Canada, once you add shipping, import tax, Canadian sales tax and exchange I’m a $100 dollars from an i7-13700k. Lol
I went the Xeon route and purchased an E5-2690v4 (14c 28t) for 55 usd for my second ASUS X99 A-II motherboard. I’m not a gamer, have an RTX a4000 for deep learning labs and compute.
Also have an ASUS X99 A-II with a 6850k, 48GB of DDR4 Corsair Vengeance, Quadro RTX 4000, Kingston 500GB m.2 nvme, and 3 x SSD for storage.

 

[thesmokingman]

There's no assumptions. We just don't give bad advice.

Upgrading the 6 year old GPU on a system with an 8 year old CPU based on a 9 year old architecture is bad advice. He's using 144 Hz monitors and won't get anywhere near that with a 5820K.

He would get a more noticeable improvement from a $250 switch to a 5600/AM4 platform than a $2000+ switch to a RTX 4090 while keeping the rest of his system.

Now imagine a $550 switch to 13600K/Z790 DDR4 and a $1200 4080. More than twice the single core performance and almost 4x the multicore. 3x the GPU performance (that can now actually be used because it won't be CPU limited most of the time).

That's not a wrong direction to take either but then again when do ppl ever listen sound asdvice...?

 

[Deleted member 185158]

Hello everyone. It has been a while since I posted here. I feel it is the time to upgrade my 6 years old 1080, but I do not want to upgrade the whole system. So as the title says, how well do the new 4xxx nvidia GPUs perform in an old system like mine? My system lacks resizable bar and other bells and whistles of the new CPUs.

Your platform should be upgraded first (in my stupid opinion).

Why?
Simply because a cheapy weepy 12400F will absolutely KILL your current 5820K (faster than a 5600X). And that would be with a cheapy ddr4 board. Looking at 200-300$ total.

Then, you'll game the 1080, will give you frame rates you didn't even know it had......

Example only, I'm not suggesting to buy a 12400F and board, but even this low end purchase would greatly reduce CPU bottle-necking. Your lows (fps) will be affordable and playable.

 

[bobbybluz]

Complete and utter waste of money that would make zero difference in gaming. Beaten by a modern cpu with half the cores. View attachment 275382

Single thread rating 60% of a $120 i3. Stop recommending 8 year old cpus as worthy of any amount of money.

I didn't recommend a 6950X, I said a 5960X was the best choice to upgrade OP's existing system. Where are you paying $200 for them? They're on Ebay far cheaper. Here's one for $60 USD and free shipping. Intel Core i7-5960X 8-Core 3.0GHz LGA2011-v3 SR20Q | Fast Ship, US Seller! | eBay

OP stated: "I feel it is the time to upgrade my 6 years old 1080, but I do not want to upgrade the whole system." All factors considered the least expensive upgrade is a cheap 5960X. With all shipping and other charges involved it'd be well under $100. He stated he didn't want to build a new system at this point in time. End of discussion.

Here's the Passmark score of my 5960X @ 4.7GHz:

 

[80251]

I'd be interested in seeing in how a GPU upgrade would benefit an X99 system or a z390 system (what I have) for that matter. Before and after benchmarks would be worth seeing.

The performance differences between my 5820 @ 4.45 Ghz. and my z390 @ 5.1 Ghz. were negligible with the same videocard (1080ti).

 

[dgianstefani]

I didn't recommend a 6950X, I said a 5960X was the best choice to upgrade OP's existing system. Where are you paying $200 for them? They're on Ebay far cheaper. Here's one for $60 USD and free shipping. Intel Core i7-5960X 8-Core 3.0GHz LGA2011-v3 SR20Q | Fast Ship, US Seller! | eBay

OP stated: "I feel it is the time to upgrade my 6 years old 1080, but I do not want to upgrade the whole system." All factors considered the least expensive upgrade is a cheap 5960X. With all shipping and other charges involved it'd be well under $100. He stated he didn't want to build a new system at this point in time. End of discussion.

Here's the Passmark score of my 5960X @ 4.7GHz:

Yeah and what's the single core score?