New system and how much for current system?

[neonplanet40]

Hi Folks,

I have 2 questions for the knowledgeable folk here I've been out of the game for too long and don't know whats happening in the computer world haha!

I am perhaps going to upgrade my main setup:

It will be used for a variety of things including gaming at 1440p.

My budget will be about £1300-£1500
What do you guys recommend?


Second question:

How much could I get for my current setup:

Spec is: Gigabyte X470 Aorus Gaming 7 Wi-Fi, AMD Ryzen 7 2700X, Patriot 32 GB DDR4 3200MHz, 256GB Crucial SSD, Kingston 256GB SSD, Palit GTX1070 GameRock Edition , OCZ Modular 620W, Akasa Eclipse-32


Thank you folks!

[Rob_B]

Depending on WHY you're upgrading I'd be tempted to just throw a 5800X3D and a new GPU (and maybe RAM) in (?)

[MrJim]

Depending on WHY you're upgrading I'd be tempted to just throw a 5800X3D and a new GPU (and maybe RAM) in (?)

My exact thought too! Definitely the most economical route. Depending on the types of games you're playing & your desired quality settings, even a 1070 is capable of gaming at 2560x1440p with reasonable frame rates.

[[GSV]Trig]

Add me to the 'just swap the CPU' brigade on this one, BIOS update and off you go according to the CPU support page..

[Percy1983]

As above, upgrade CPU to a 5800x3D (or 5900x if a lot of productivity) and potentially more/faster storage.

GPU is generally ok for 1440p but of course you could upgrade that too.

Of course sell what you pull out, would be much better money wise than selling it all and buying everything again.

[neonplanet40]

Okay, I'm listening haha. I do want a new gpu. But willing to upgrade cpu. What ram to accompany it? Think I'll need a new case too. My akasa is getting on a bit haha. I do have a 850w EVGA G6 psu already.

[cptwhite_uk]

Case - Fractal North / Fractal Pop / Lian Li Lancool 216 / Lian Li Lancool 3 / Corsair 4000D Airflow / NZXT H5 Flow
CPU - 5800X3D
GPU - Depends on budget, but the Arc A750 8Gb or RX 6600 XT (£250) / RX 6700 XT 12Gb (£380) are probabbly your best sub £400 options, if looking to spend more, wait for the RTX 4070/4060 and RX 7800 series cards which are due in the April to June timeframe.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It depends on what games you are running - a Ryzen 7 5700X might be a cheaper upgrade than a Ryzen 7 5800X3D. Only get a Ryzen 7 5800X3D if the games you intend to play like the extra L3 cache. That includes games like Fallout 4:



SSDs are plummeting in price due to oversupply,so I would look at getting a 2TB NVME SSD - decent ones can be had for well under £150 now.

WRT to a dGPU,the RX6600XT and A750 are decent value,but if upgrading now I would really get an RTX3060TI/RX6700/RX6700XT if below £400. The RX6700/RX6700XT have more than 8GB of VRAM which is going to be useful as time progresses.

[MrJim]

What ram to accompany it?

The first thing I'd do is to try a bit of manual overclocking. Because of the way Ryzen 3 works with infinity fabric, the optimum RAM speed is 3600 with as tight timings you can get whilst remaining stable. With a little extra voltage if necessary, you should be able to overclock to 3600, & if not, you've not spent any money in the process

[neonplanet40]

Will.iverclocking be impacted (I haven't overclocked yet) by the fact I have 4x 8gb ram dimms?

Is overlooking easy?

I was also thinking of a 6800xt or similar from amd as somethings there is a deal on these (although rare as old stock). Is it a good card, or is nvidia preferred these days?

Something thst could do 4k gaming would allow an element of future proofing.

[DanceswithUnix]

I honestly would do just a CPU upgrade to start with. Your ram seems fast and plentiful enough so I would put that at the back of the upgrade list.

The jump from a 2700X to a 5000 series (pretty much any of them) would be noticable. Hard to find direct comparisons, but 2700X to 5800X3D the frame rates in CS:GO here almost double, others like Hitman 3 go up 60%.

https://youtu.be/hBFNoKUHjcg?t=717

A 5900X is better if you want productivity for about the same money as the 5800X3D, but Cat's shout of a 5700X is a decent performer if you want to save a few quid. Performance shouldn't be far off the 5800X in that Gamer's Nexus review I linked.

If you buy from the right people (Scan included) then you get Company of Heroes 3 bundled with the CPU apparently. I didn't know that, and got my 5900X from Amazon. Ho hum

You list a couple of small SSDs in your setup. SSDs are cheapish right now, so as a quality of life improvement you might want to drop ~£110 on a 2TB NVMe SSD. Then you can ditch the spinning disk.

High end GPU market still seems to be shaking down atm, so it feels to me like putting off that upgrade for now would be a good thing. If you are dropping £1000 on a GPU, then you probably want a PSU upgrade to cope with the power peaks these things can demand.

Right now, £1400 gets you a 5700X and an RTX 4080

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/amd-...cie-40-65w-cpu
https://www.scan.co.uk/products/pali...-9728-core-250

Or you could go 7900XTX which seems roughly equivalent to the RTX 4080 for £100 less, which should pay for your PSU upgrade:

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/sapp...3-6144-streams

[MrJim]

Will.iverclocking be impacted (I haven't overclocked yet) by the fact I have 4x 8gb ram dimms?

Is overlooking easy?

Were the four modules bought as a kit, or did you mix two kits? Having four modules might reduce the achievable overclock, but it's probably just a case of trying it out & see how you get on. A lot depends on the memory controller on your cpu, your ram modules, & your motherboard bios.

There's are plenty of guides on Youtube for overclocking DDR4 on Ryzen:

https://www.youtube.com/results?sear...m+overclocking

The first one by hardware unboxed (at least, it was first on my list) is fairly straight forward:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOqhyVNPhaM

[neonplanet40]

Apologies for the typos in the previous post. I was using my phone... I just mash the life out of the keys and hope for the best

Regarding my ram - They weren't bought as a pack of 4. They were 2x 2 packs. But the ram models are the exact same.

Sometimes the 6800xt has been available for around £540. I had thought that was a decent price if I could get it.

I am happy to get an nvme and get rid of all other drives. Good pay to reduce power too.

I already have a new PSU (impulse buy a few months ago - 850w EVGA G6).

[Saracen999]

I was about where you are (with a different target budget and a MUCH older base spec to start from) about a year ago. Gotta say, you timed this pretty well. Not perfectly, but not far off. We've had major CPU, GPU, mobo, RAM generation, and SSD changes in the last year or so, and I keep finding myself thinking ".... but XYZ is due in x months and might be worth waitig for". Here I am, a year later, still thinking it (re: slightly lower-end X3D GPUs).

My takeaway from that year is really two-fold :-

- you need to decide what the system is really for, i.e. needs to do really well, and what is 'nice but not fundamental',

- avoid the gotchas, 'cos there are some.

Gotcha 1, is if going lae Gen Intel CPU, you need Win 11. I don't (really don't) want to do that, though might end up getting forced into it. Grrr, snarl.

Gotcha 2 is latest Gen Intel CPUs, and much more so GPUs, tend to be power-hungry from what I can tell. Some, extremely so, but they tend to be big-budget GPUs so not too much of a concern.

Some CPU upgrades will let you stay with DDR4 (like AMD last gen i.e. 5700X, 5800x, etc) but others (later AMD, 7800X, 7900X etc) require DDR5. That isn't much of a problem if you're changing RAM anyway (such as, selling entire system) as the cost difference between DDR4 and DDR5 is way less than a few months ago. For Intel, you can probably use either DDR4 or DDR5 but generally need to pick which when choosing mobo. I haven't seen any hybrid boards that will support either/or, like in the past.

Watch out hard for memory compatibility. From what seems to be coming to light very recently (i.e. recent days) the latest Gen AMD X3D chips are extremely picky when you turn on the sort-of auto-memory boosting. Not a h'expert here, but as I understand it, Intel XMP and AMD whatever-they-call-it, require a BIOS setting turned on to get the rated speed on the RAM, or you basically get the base memory speed for that generation, which is best for initial setup, but leaves a LOT of RAM perfomance unused and wasted if not subsequently enabled. JayzTwoCents covered his issues (might be related to his specific CPU unit, a 7950X3D IIRC) or might not, but he couldn't get i to boot at all, with that feature turned on. As he points out, brand new CPU generation, might well be fixed in weeks/months via BIOS upgrades.

The gotcha is, the fancier you get, the less mass-tested so much is, and the more 'teething' difficulties you may face.

And that is a large part of why I'm still umm'ing and ahh'ing after a year.

Other issues - your balance between gaming and 'productivity'. I, of course, want to have my cake and eat it, so ..... both. AMD X3D chips, memory timings aside, are probably optimum for MOST games, provided you're not playing something primarily core-related (in which case, vanilla X, not X3D), probably better. Or, ray-tracing dependent in which case, probably better to concentrate on nvidia GPUs not new (soon) AMD releases.

So, if heavily games oriented, which games and what they require most, matters. Also, for most productivity tasks, you're better off with straight X CPus than X3D most of the time, because the X3D give more very fast cache but only on half the cores (on models so far) and base clock speeds are lower than non-X3D variants as well. Oh, and again, depending on what productivity tasks, you might be better off tagetting loads and loads of memory, than fancy GPUs, including for many video production jobs, code compiling and so on.

But ultimately, if most of the above really matters to you, i.e. your work and income depends on it, then you'd probably know all that already anyway, and pretty much any variant of late-model CPU/GPU combo is gonna give you a heck of a boost over the current system, so how much does a bit this way or that actually matter?

It's very seductive to get sucked into 'this CPU/GPU is x% faster than that, or y% slower than the other, and for only £z difference in cost, and lose sight of the fact that any of them blow existing performance into last month. My conclusion is that it only matters in the sense of getting the best possible bang-per-buck, as the saying goes, for your budget when the reality is, almost anything will be impressive as hell. And probably do you. Nonetheless, getting the most out of your spend is tempting, but after a while, contemplating this versus that ends up with utter inertia. Welcome to my world.

[[GSV]Trig]

FWIW, we've just had some 12th gen Intel stuff arrive at work with Windows 11 on, rolled back to Windows 10 and things work well enough.
I know there's the whole thing about thread director or whatever its called sorting out what workloads are meant to go to which cores etc but IME its not a huge issue, especially if you cant use Windows 11 for whatever reason (Kenwood programming software doesn't like Windows 11 in my case)

[DanceswithUnix]

Sometimes the 6800xt has been available for around £540. I had thought that was a decent price if I could get it.

It's really not a bad price in the current market. Looking at this graph from the TechPowerup 4070ti review:



it's quite close on the heels of the £800 4070ti. A 7900 XT (not the XTX) is about 50% more money and 30% faster. So nice card, just easy to get attracted by the shiny of a recently released 7900XT

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/sapph...gx-3a2-sp.html