I’m upgrading from a 4770 to a 9600. This is my budget free living room PC build. I’m trying to keep everything even bottleneck wise.
Helldovers is starting to chug like I put water in my cars gas tank. My Gtx1060 is…old.
What GPU should I upgrade to? I was looking at 2080s for around $200.
Does anyone have any better ideas?
So the Intel budget card explicitly does not support 9th gen Intel. Oddly enough I just listened to the LTT wan show and they mentioned it.
When the 5k series comes out hopefully they’ll dump pricing a bit more. I’d be perfectly fine with a 3060 or TI!
Also thank you for the write up!
The Intrl B580 also has a bit more driver overhead than AMD/NVidia, and might not be the best choice for older CPUs
Yes and to be clear it will not run older titles well and won’t support my current platform.
Oh yeah, arc battle mage requires resizable BAR and a few other newer cpu/pcie memory tricks to perform correctly that make it not great on cpu’s older than maybe 10th/11th gen intel or ryzen 2.
Yep! Have no idea what resizable BAR is. But I won’t have it on my next upgraded rig. I will always be 2-6 gens behind on hardware for ram and CPU. My most current rig is a 8750h/1060. And it’s putting around fine.
Bummer on the Intel card. $250 is hard to come by with new hardware!
Missing from this comparison is the 6650XT and the 6750XT, so you might look up benchmarks to see how they fare against others.
Either way, I think you have a lot of good options that you could potentially get for a good price.
Yes, thank you for this. I’m going to dig more though some options. It might be just me, but the CPU/GPU benchmark and bottleneck sites seem like their just covering their asses on performances? Like they don’t want to be explicit about pairing cards and processors.
Does it have to be the 9600? iirc the B580 works with 10th gen. I’d guess you’re probably not buying new but the new prices of the 9600 and 10600KF are very similar on PCPartPicker. On ebay it looks like you can get a used 10400 for only a little more than a used 9600 (admittedly I don’t typically buy used so I could be missing something there). I don’t know about compatible motherboards though.
If you can’t make it work for the B580 then a 2080 for $200 would offer excellent price to performance, though you may find yourself limited by the 8 GB VRAM before too long. If you can find a 6700 XT for no more than $260 or a 2080 Ti for no more than $275 that would offer about the same price to performance as the B580 (based on TechPowerUp’s database of relative GPU performance). Knock about $30-40 off those prices to have price to performance on par with a $200 2080.
Yep. The 9600k is sitting on my desk right now. Motherboard and ram in the mail.
Got it for free from my nephew.
I’m stuck with the 9600k as it was free. I’m paying $90 total for the mobo, and ram. That’s practically half a computer for $90 bucks. Adding a CPU into the mix would make this upgrade a non starter. Plus it’s 30% improvment just in CPU upgrade. Id love to get a reasonably priced 2080!
Just so you do know helldivers will be bottlenecked on the cpu with any reasonable gpu upgrade so don’t worry too hard about unbalancing it a bit more if you wanted to go for a 4060ti instead. You’re getting a nice upgrade but the 9600k is still only 6 cores just keep in mind. Modern stuff is going to be tough. This year’s games are kicking my own 9700k ass at 1440p.
I have a 4070ti and it’s chilling at like 60% much of the time on games like helldivers or marvel rivals so when I do upgrade it’ll be massive. I can play games from 2018 at a bajillion fames though. Just wanted to give you my acedotal for your brain pocket.
Yes helldivers seems to be optimized for NASAs Minecraft computer for TNT simulation. Not standard computers. But man…I’m running into 20-60fps depending on what’s going on in game. If I could do 40-60fps that’s a win for me.
I have the game heavily loaded to the GPU side in riva tuner. It’ll usually be 90% GPU and 60/80% CPU load.
Medium-high, 1080p, fsr quality, dx11.
My max processor on that mobo being 9900k gives me the smallest wiggle room but it’ll be okay. I don’t need 4k ultra dlss 240fps cyberpunk RTX gameplay. I want 1080p, 60fps low-med stable gameplay. I can leave the graphics envy to the kids with money.
I totally see your point and agree with your path! I just wanted to point out that the core amount is more debilitating now than it might have been a few years ago. My 9700k can run battlefront 2 or bf1 and 144hz locked. It’s just since 2021 spec requirements on the cpu side have spiked since they more than doubled the cores and threads across the board. It’s completely silly that bf2042 looks worse than bf5 in a lot of situations but has my cpu crying for death lol.
Cpu limited stuttering is way worse than gpu too. Marvel rivals I’m pulling 80-90fps in fights which is honestly impressive, the issue being it feels like total shit because it is the cpu that is redlining.
If you run into the same issue, you can use process Explorer to keep your cpu under 97%, which makes it feel much better
So I’ll be using Linux for gaming. But I know I can do the same in Linux. Other than Doom the dark ages, I see no games I’m interested in that may possibly need an upgrade in hardware. And I’m gonna assume if my 4770/1060 can run eternal at 60fps high/ultra 1080p I’ll be fine for the future.
That seems like unreal engine 5 problems. I won’t be buying games with unreal engine 5. I don’t like the way they feel while playing.
It does yea ue5 has been a bit sludge. Rivals is really the first one I’ve played that’s nice
Yeah it’s hard to beat a free 5 generation CPU upgrade, good luck to you on the GPU hunt. You could also consider an RX 6650 XT or RX 7600 for around the same price as a 2080, TechPowerUp has them all within 1-2% of each other in relative performance. The 4060 is right in that same ballpark performance-wise, but obviously it’s going to be a lot harder to find one in that low-$200s budget.
Again, those are all gonna be 8 GB cards. If you’re looking for more VRAM and the 6700 XT or 2080 Ti at the prices I mentioned before are out of the budget, you could also look for a 1080 Ti, TechPowerUp has it at about 90% of the performance of a 2080.
So I’ve been checking out the 7600xt and the 7700xt. I thought those were $200 cards used. They’re going for $300?
1080ti comes with the caveat of trying to find a sfx power supply to host it. Well…I guess they all do. But I’ll need a 700 watt. I have a 500 watt right now.