Upgrade Advice!

Kajidourden

Based on what I have seen looking at my specs and at what's available on the market today it seems as though I only need to update my graphics card really. Wanted to get comparison data from people more saavy than I on the matter since I'm only looking at numbers, not the intricate differences that aren't on the face specs.

MOBO: ASUS ROG Maximus VI (Not %100 on the version there but it's a one down one up kinda thing)

CPU: Core i7 2600k @ 3.4ghz

RAM: 16GB (32 but for some reason windows only recognizes 16) Ripjaw DDR3

GPU: First Gen TITAN 6Gb

PC was built back in 201...2? Early 13?

When I look at what's out there on newegg I see very expensive new tech with not very much improvement. Seems Processors have more or less sprouted a few more cores (mostly pointless) and moved the scale up about .5ghz to where 4.0 is seemingly where you want to get to with some overclocking.

Do I only need to upgrade my graphics card here to move into the 4K/VR ready situation? Everything else seems to be a small upgrade.

Quizzical

That's a very nice gaming computer from five years ago, at least if it has an SSD that you didn't mention.  Because a computer that doesn't have an SSD will feel slow for a lot of things.  That's rarely a frame rate problem, however.

The upgrade question would basically be, is there some reason why it isn't fast enough?  If your goal is to get to high monitor resolutions and refresh rates, then it's likely that the video card is old enough that it won't have the proper monitor ports to output 4K at 60 Hz or whatever it is that you're hoping for.

That said, your CPU is fairly dated, too.  It was a great CPU for its era, and still not bad today, but there are newer CPUs that are much faster.  If you've got the sort of money to spend for which it made sense to buy a Titan, you might want to wait until GPU prices settle down from the Ethereum mining craze and then replace the computer outright.

The big difference with CPUs is IPC, not just clock speed.  The latest Coffee Lake CPUs might be 50% faster per core at the same clock speed as your old Sandy Bridge CPU.

If you've got Windows 7 Home Premium, then that's why your memory is capped at 16 GB.  If you wanted to use more than 16 GB, you had to buy Windows 7 Professional.  I'm not sure about caps with Windows 8, and I think Windows 10 Home increased the cap.

Kajidourden

Quizzical said:

That's a very nice gaming computer from five years ago, at least if it has an SSD that you didn't mention.  Because a computer that doesn't have an SSD will feel slow for a lot of things.  That's rarely a frame rate problem, however.

The upgrade question would basically be, is there some reason why it isn't fast enough?  If your goal is to get to high monitor resolutions and refresh rates, then it's likely that the video card is old enough that it won't have the proper monitor ports to output 4K at 60 Hz or whatever it is that you're hoping for.

That said, your CPU is fairly dated, too.  It was a great CPU for its era, and still not bad today, but there are newer CPUs that are much faster.  If you've got the sort of money to spend for which it made sense to buy a Titan, you might want to wait until GPU prices settle down from the Ethereum mining craze and then replace the computer outright.

The big difference with CPUs is IPC, not just clock speed.  The latest Coffee Lake CPUs might be 50% faster per core at the same clock speed as your old Sandy Bridge CPU.

If you've got Windows 7 Home Premium, then that's why your memory is capped at 16 GB.  If you wanted to use more than 16 GB, you had to buy Windows 7 Professional.  I'm not sure about caps with Windows 8, and I think Windows 10 Home increased the cap.

Thanks.  That's kinda how I'm leaning at the moment too.  I think I will wait until i'm ready to outright replace the whole thing since the CPU is pretty dated, which is kind of a chain reaction of needing to upgrade.  

I definitely want to go the 4K/VR route with it, so I think the best thing to do here is wait for a bit.  considering that the Vive pro will be a thing eventually.

Cleffy

If you want to game at 4K and VR, then you definitely need to wait. While current hardware was close to playing games at these settings, they were still not quite there. For future games and poorly optimized ones like Kingdom Come Deliverance, they do not meet what I would consider the minimum requirements.

Personally, I feel when you are playing a game it should be at 60 fps for a single monitor or 90 fps for VR 99% of the time. Dips in this can cause some disorientation, especially in VR. Right now the 1080 Ti cannot achieve this on the most recent games.

Kajidourden

Cleffy said:

If you want to game at 4K and VR, then you definitely need to wait. While current hardware was close to playing games at these settings, they were still not quite there. For future games and poorly optimized ones like Kingdom Come Deliverance, they do not meet what I would consider the minimum requirements.

Personally, I feel when you are playing a game it should be at 60 fps for a single monitor or 90 fps for VR 99% of the time. Dips in this can cause some disorientation, especially in VR. Right now the 1080 Ti cannot achieve this on the most recent games.

Thanks for the info!  I need to get better about keeping up with benchamarking and other hardware news.  Do you have an recommendations?

Cleffy

Anandtech, hardware canucks, and hardware nexus are the best in my opinion.