GPU Upgrade? Yes/No

[apcs13]

Hi everyone,

Just under a year ago, I built my first PC for personal use (I had built a few prior for friends and for a non-profit), and the specs are what are currently written in my signature. Overall, despite having a few major issues with the PC, I have really enjoyed becoming a part of the community as well as using the PC. However, it is now that joyous time of year where money flows more freely from the pockets of the average Joe, and I am feeling a little less stingy. However, I am by no means a wealthy person, and am actually currently a student, so money isn't exactly abundant in my current situation.

What I was thinking about doing is selling my GTX 770 on eBay or somewhere for $200-$250 since I got it for around $350 and got very lucky, since it is a sublime overclocking card and runs fabulously and cool. With that money, plus some extra that I have been saving, I was thinking that I could buy a GTX 970, which is currently $350 in my region. Either that, or I could purchase an AMD R9 290 for around $250, which while being a fantastic deal based on the card's performance, I've had issues with AMD drivers in the past and am not sure how much they have improved.

One thing that is making me uncertain about upgrading my graphics card also is my current CPU. I have an FX-6350 at 4.4 GHz, and while it is a solid processor, there's no denying that it is hardly top of the line. I was concerned that upgrading my GPU wouldn't be effective due to my lackluster CPU, so I figured some of you kind people may want to give some insight into that. And no, I am not thinking about upgrading my CPU, because I would want to get an Intel chip, which would mean a new motherboard, and then I would have to reinstall Windows, which I have already done once or twice on my PC (due to aforementioned issues) and really have no desire to do again until I get an SSD alongside Windows 10 in 2015.

TL;DR: Based on my current PC config, would it be worth it to sell my GTX 770 and make an upgrade? And if so, what makes more sense, an R9 290, or GTX 970? Thanks!

 

[random5]

GTX 970 all the way, lower TDP,superior performance,more features.

 

[Josh138]

I would go with the 970. You can upgrade the CPU/mobo later to get the best performance but most games bottleneck at the GPU and not the CPU. The great thing about the 970 is that it will be one of the best pieces of hardware for a while. I would not recommend an AMD card, they don't get the optimizations that NVIDIA gets with many games. I even have a quad core AMD on my desktop so don't think I'm slanted against AMD unnecessarily.

 

[mdocod]

Correction, all of the current production GTX970's have about the same TDP as the GTX770.

-------

apcs13,

Think of performance and visual quality as separate issues, and you'll realize there is no such thing as too much CPU or too much GPU for a build. There is such a thing as not enough CPU for a particular performance goal, and there is such a thing as not enough GPU for a particular visual quality goal, but there's no such thing as a "bad" combination of CPU and GPU if you can appreciate the balance of performance vs visual quality that the combo produces. If you're happy with the performance that the 6350@4.4ghz does for you in games, then you'll be equally happy with it on the GTX970, but will be able to run with the same performance levels with higher visual quality settings.

Keep in mind that performance originates with the CPU, and all the hard limits of performance are set by the CPU. Any CPU related performance bottlenecks that you have now will not improve with the new GPU.

I can not advise going to an R9 290. The Driver/API stack for Nvidia is actually better optimized for the many-core architecture of AMD CPUs than AMD's own driver/API stack in DX11 games.

 

[menetlaus]

Personally - stick with what you've got. As a student/content of OP, I'm assuming you do not have a whole lot of income, or ability to live without the PC for a few weeks/month if needed to RMA the 970.

Just looked at some reviews on the 970, specifically BF4@1080P/Ultra: 770 - 58.9FPS, 970 - 77.2FPS (30% improvement). Thief - 51.8 vs 69.8 (35%). Arma 3 770 - 58.9 vs 70.0 (18%) These results were on a system using an i7-3960X (3.3 GHz, Six Cores) - So the CPU has FAR better headroom to allow the 970 to shine.

Yes, the 970GTX is a lot better than the 770 you have now - but IMHO unless you sell the 770 to a friend/locally you will be hard pressed to get $250+ for it. Assuming you do manage to get $200 for it, the 970 is then an additional $150 - and I do not believe you will see enough performance gains for the $ to make it worthwhile.

Please note: I am not knocking the 970 ("[strike]lower TDP[/strike], superior performance, more features" vs 770 is true) I just don't think it is worth an extra $100+ especially as you already have a great overclocking 770 that runs cool.

 

[neigenoire]

The 970 would definitely be a worthy upgrade. Looking at gaming benchmarks alone, it provides a huge and noticeable improvement.

Like it has already been stated above, you shouldn't worry about your CPU. It won't bottleneck your performance as far as gaming goes in 99% of cases. You can comfortably run most modern games on the market at maximum settings with less powerful CPUs than your FX.

 

[mdocod]

"maximum settings" have little to nothing to do with the CPU.

 

[apcs13]

Thanks everyone for your quick and very helpful replies, they are much appreciated! I would reply to each and every one of you individually, but since you all seem to say the same thing, I feel as though that may be a little redundant and a waste of your time to read through. So, instead, I will address this to all of you at once:

Where do you think the best place to sell my GTX 770 would be? Also, what do you think a decent price point for the card would be? As of now, the card is 10 months old, has never really had any issues whatsoever, and also overclocks very well, to 1267 MHz on the core and over 7.2 GHz on the effective memory speed with not much time spent tweaking and no voltage changing at all. It also is a Gigabyte Windforce 3x edition card, so it runs cool and quiet. I have noticed on eBay used GTX 770's going from anywhere from $160-300 (I live in the US so all pricing has to be USD by the way), so I want to get as much money as I can, but I also want this to sell relatively quickly, since I don't want to spend money on a new card while still having my 770, since I would have no use for it.

Thank you all so much!

 

[mdocod]

The 4GB models are the ones going for bigger bucks because they are in demand to fulfill SLI upgrade plans. The 2GB models are probably worth a bit under $200 used at this point.

 

[HomerThompson]

I wouldn't upgrade a 770 a year later unless I had stupid money to spend. Upgrade once the 770 sucks for gaming.

 

[apcs13]

The 4GB models are the ones going for bigger bucks because they are in demand to fulfill SLI upgrade plans. The 2GB models are probably worth a bit under $200 used at this point.

Yesterday I saw an EVGA GTX 770 2GB with the current bid at a little over $280 with 9 minutes left to bid. It probably went up even more in those last few minutes. There is a reference 770 2GB with 1 hour left to bid right now at $212.50, and that will probably rise too. Not saying you're wrong, I'm sure the majority of GTX 770s are under $200 right now, but I just have seen some success in those cards selling for more than that.

 

[apcs13]

I wouldn't upgrade a 770 a year later unless I had stupid money to spend. Upgrade once the 770 sucks for gaming.

Well, it is just something I thought I could use to increase the longevity of my system for gaming and the like, and since there are a lot of deals coming up this Friday, I figured it may become even cheaper. Also, if all goes well with my eBay selling plan, the upgrade may only cost me $100-$150 and come with Far Cry 4 for free (which I planned on getting anyways) so I figured that may work out to be a pretty solid deal financially and in terms of my PC.

Also, one big reason is that the GTX 970 has 4GB of VRAM, and I chose to have the 2GB GTX 770 because of the 256-bit memory bus limitations that it possesses. However, despite the 970 having a 256-bit memory bus as well, NVIDIA is now utilizing some type of 3D stacked memory that apparently makes it so that the 256-bit bus is more than sufficient for 4GB of VRAM. Otherwise, there is no way that they would use such a limited bus on their high end cards like the 970 and 980.

 

[HomerThompson]

Wow, if you can get someone to pay $280 absolutely sell that card ASAP.

 

[mdocod]

There seems to be some confusion about memory bandwidth and size. There is no "limitation" preventing the use of 4GB, 6GB, 12GB or more VRAM on any bus width. The inability to make use a particular balance between VRAM size and Bandwidth has more to do with software than with hardware. The variety of texture detail, vs the quality of texture detail is a major factor here. If one were to develop a game with enough unique textures, but only so many of them ever appearing on the screen at once, then we could indeed take advantage of ever increasing VRAM size without any change in bandwidth.

 

[apcs13]

There seems to be some confusion about memory bandwidth and size. There is no "limitation" preventing the use of 4GB, 6GB, 12GB or more VRAM on any bus width. The inability to make use a particular balance between VRAM size and Bandwidth has more to do with software than with hardware. The variety of texture detail, vs the quality of texture detail is a major factor here. If one were to develop a game with enough unique textures, but only so many of them ever appearing on the screen at once, then we could indeed take advantage of ever increasing VRAM size without any change in bandwidth.

I don't mean to start a conflict or anything, but I did a LOT of research before buying the 2GB GTX 770 on memory bandwidth and the like, and there most certainly is a difference in bus sizes and memory utilization. That's why in the previous gen on AMD and bleeding edge NVIDIA hardware, there was 512-bit memory buses on their cards with 4 or 8GB VRAM. 256-bit buses wouldn't be enough to fully utilize such large quantities of VRAM. However, this generation, since NVIDIA has created their 3D- memory stacking technology, they have been able to streamline the memory bandwidth utilization and use smaller buses without limiting memory performance.

If a 256-bit memory bus was 100% effective with any compatible memory quantity, then how come the the R9 290, 290X and Nvidia GXT Titan Black used 512-bit memory buses? Based on my research and the logic that companies abide by, I believe that they wouldn't have put in extra effort, time, and money in giving these GPUs a larger memory bus if it would afford the same performance as a 256-bit bus would.

 

[apcs13]

Just to let you guys know, I went ahead and ordered a Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX 970, and it arrives in 2 days (Monday). I will update this thread with what I think about my upgrade and if it was worth it. Also, I got Far Cry 4 for free with this GPU, so I can run some performance benchmarks in the game with my new GPU and my 6350 to see how severe the bottleneck is, although performance with FC4 seems to be pretty sporadic and not optimal on many hardware configurations. I will also do it in some other games such as Battlefield 3 and Far Cry 3.

Thanks again for the help!

 

[mdocod]

I don't mean to start a conflict or anything, but I did a LOT of research before buying the 2GB GTX 770 on memory bandwidth and the like

You're missing the point that I made by a mile and a half.

 

[apcs13]

I don't mean to start a conflict or anything, but I did a LOT of research before buying the 2GB GTX 770 on memory bandwidth and the like

You're missing the point that I made by a mile and a half.

Would you care to explain, then? If I missed it by such a vast amount , I think we could all benefit if you explained it better.

 

[mdocod]

There's a false impression that the a certain bandwidth is required to make use of ever increasing VRAM. This may be true in practice with many existing games, but it is certainly not an absolute. How the software leverages VRAM space is really the issue. A viewport in a 3D CAD application or 3D modeling/animation software can easily wind up using many gigabytes of VRAM, even on very narrow memory buses... (128bit)

 

[apcs13]

There's a false impression that the a certain bandwidth is required to make use of ever increasing VRAM. This may be true in practice with many existing games, but it is certainly not an absolute. How the software leverages VRAM space is really the issue. A viewport in a 3D CAD application or 3D modeling/animation software can easily wind up using many gigabytes of VRAM, even on very narrow memory buses... (128bit)

The main topic of this thread was concerning gaming, so this is the most prevalent issue...

The issue is in the efficiency and "effectiveness" of the VRAM being utilized. In games, the usage needs to be as fast as possible so textures can load cleanly and whenever they are needed, so the memory needs a large amount of bandwidth. In 3D modeling software, it can take time to load and render without the greatest urgency. In theory, 8GB VRAM on a 128-bit bus would work totally fine this way. But the same isn't true for gaming.

Benchmarks of the 4GB GTX 770 vs the 2GB variant on many different games on many different resolutions show the greatest performance gap being 2-3 FPS, despite the fact that one card has double the amount of VRAM. This includes situations where the 2GB VRAM limit was met and exceeded. Why is this? It's because the extra VRAM cannot be used effectively due to the limited size of the memory bus, so it is essentially worthless. Again, this is for gaming, which is the main purpose of my PC and the center of the topic of my reason to upgrade as discussed in this thread.

 

[Guest]

The 970 would definitely be a worthy upgrade. Looking at gaming benchmarks alone, it provides a huge and noticeable improvement.

Like it has already been stated above, you shouldn't worry about your CPU. It won't bottleneck your performance as far as gaming goes in 99% of cases. You can comfortably run most modern games on the market at maximum settings with less powerful CPUs than your FX.

As long as all those CPUs are quad core they should not affect graphic performance that much. Dual core CPUs, however, do bottleneck graphic card performance.

I have experienced that personally when my hard drive died in my Core i7 computer (first generation i7 940). I moved the graphics card (GeForce GTX 550 Ti) from it to my AMD X2 4800+ Dual Core computer while I awaited the arrival of my new SSD to replace the HD. In my Core i7 computer I could run the game I play online (War Thunder) all the time on high settings at 1920x1080 resolution with that video card getting between 50 and 120 fps in game depending on map played. When I moved the video card to the dual core computer I could barely run the game on minimum graphic settings with 10 to 20 fps! The game was not enjoyable at all with that frame rate.

So, four cores for gaming are important, which is why the Core i5 4670K (4 core, no hyper-threading) is considered one of the best gaming CPUs. Core i7s are better for games that use more than just 4 cores, that take advantage of hyper-threading as well, which some games are starting to do.

 

[apcs13]

Just to let you know, I just got my Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX 970 and am running some last minute benchmarks on my 770 before I yank it out and will update results when I am finished with those.

UPDATE: I got in my 970 and thankfully so far everything seems to be working fine (I have had some bad graphics card mishaps in the past). So far I have had the time to run only one game, that being Far Cry 3, and even though I didn't have time to do a formal benchmark, my minimum framerate seemed to rise almost 10 FPS and stay much closer to 60 FPS or better, despite having my CPU. I also left the GPU at stock clocks, and will overclock when I have had time.

So far, as long as my GTX 770 sells well, my 970 was a solid future-proofing upgrade.