Hi all, I'm looking to either upgrade or even replace my current gaming PC and/or monitor. I've been saving up for this upgrade for a long time and now have around £2k, but don't really know where to invest my cash to get the best returns, with the exception of a new GPU, which will probably be an RTX 380 (EVGA maybe?). Card aside, how best the spend the rest of the money? I currently have an old 1440p monitor that's kind of stood the test of time, but this is on the hit list to be replaced. Is 4K really the way to go, or is a really plush 1440p G-Sync monitor a better bet? I mainly play single player games, so detail is more important than fast-paced run and gun action, if that makes a difference. Or should I go for a new motherboard, CPU and RAM? Or how about faster storage? Or maybe a full new build? I'm an enthusiastic builder, but lack the knowledge and experience to answer these questions for myself, so many thanks in advance for your advice. Here's my current setup according to Speccy: Operating System Windows 10 Home 64-bit CPU Intel Core i7 5820K @ 3.30GHz 42 °C Haswell-E/EP 22nm Technology RAM 32.0GB Unknown @ 1199MHz (15-15-15-35) Motherboard ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. X99-DELUXE II (SOCKET 2011) 49 °C Graphics DELL U2711 (2560x1440@59Hz) 3071MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti (ASUStek Computer Inc) 47 °C Storage 238GB SAMSUNG MZHPV256HDGL-00000 (SATA (SSD)) 39 °C 1863GB Seagate ST2000DX001-1NS164 (SATA ) 30 °C Optical Drives HL-DT-ST BDDVDRW CH12NS30 Audio Realtek High Definition Audio
Really need to understand your goals, what you are missing in your current setup, regarding 4k, its is about what you are comfortable with, choose screen size you want then the right res for it that suits you, target will all depend on what you are comfortable with, for me that is something in the 100-130dpi range, where I can sit comfortably away without scaling fonts for text, lots of people jump on cheap 27" 4k and then moan that scaling is bad in window and end up running them at a rate that matches 1440p which is pointless extra load of GPU for bugger all gain unless you like really crisp text in docs and internet. The size and res you have now isn't bad ~108dpi, if that is the size of screen you are happy with, your GPU is probably perfect for that res too, so what are you trying to achieve?
Good questions. At the moment I suffer from a lot of screen tearing, draw distance texture pop-ups and relatively long load times. I've never seen a 4K display, so don't know how much crisper an image a new monitor would deliver at that resolution. The type of games I enjoy playing are Far Cry 5 (quite a beautiful game, but dreadful for the draw distance problems described above), and modded versions of Fallout 4, The Witcher 3 and Skyrim. I'd like to take on Microsoft Flight Simulator, but believe my system would end up crying if I asked it to play that. My goal is to play games as smoothly as possible with as much graphical fidelity as possible.
its not your GPU its your slow memory speed and 2014 CPU get some dope ram, run it over 2 sticks in dual channel and clean up your hard drive and background processes might cost you 60 bucks
Also remember that some stuff like draw distance issues aren't hw related but game related. The most powerful part of your PC is your gpu I think, so there are probably other areas you could look at first, if you're installing games on the HDD instead of the SSD then that's a huge easy upgrade, people would recommend a NVME drive but I've no experience so can't say which one, even going to SATA SSD over the HDD would result in much faster loading times.
That's a 2TB spinning disk. Get a 1 or 2TB SSD for games and loading times / texture pop-ups should be a thing of the past. For screen tearing, consider Free/G-sync monitor. I heard good things with this monitor recently: electriQ 27" IPS QHD 1440p 95Hz FreeSync. You can go faster or higher resolution. Flight Simulator 2020 should work with your system no problem. Loading time will be loooooong, but a SSD should fix that easily. Do you have an upgrade budget in mind?
Overclock the CPU (Haswell-e should be good for over 4Ghz quite easily on all cores) and see if you can get some more speed out of the memory - assuming its 2400Mhz given DDR4. Both steps are free and should net you a decent bump in games, at least on the minimums. Then as @wyx087 suggests get a decent sized SSD to replace the HDD for your primary games - older or less played games will be fine on the SSD unless they utilize texture streaming heavily.
The texture pop ups could well be a part of the game itself rather than your hardware. Try Adaptive Vsync. That should totally get rid of the screen tearing. It's kinda like a poor man's Gsync.
I remember trying adaptive sync when they were introduced, at FPS between 30 and 60, in some games, I can still see tearing. I now still use triple buffering + forced Vsync. I take a hit with image delay and I also take a hit in FPS, but no tearing and totally okay in singleplayer.
At 1440p you should not see 30-60 FPS. Not with a 1080Ti. It should be easily able to overpower that.
Thanks for all your input. I'll try out several of your very useful suggestions and see if I can hang onto my cash for at least a little bit longer
