Nvidia upgrade question

Sep 15, 2018
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I'm looking at finally upgrading my Skyrim system, I've been enjoying the lack of a need to upgrade for the past several years even with new games.

MB is a Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3-iSSD F2, and I currently have an Nvidia GTX 580. The motherboard comforms to PCIe 2.0. I'm not sure which video card I'd like to go to, but when I look at, for example, a 1080 I see that it's PCIe 3.0. Will this not work at all on my MB, or just maybe not to optimal performance or whatever?

Does anyone have a specific card they would recommend? This might be the first time I've been able to do an upgrade just by switching out the video card since I can remember. I'm proud of my machine for getting this far without SSD, HDD, or any other failures.

I believe I can also buy a second GTX 580 and do SLI, but I'm not sure if that's a better option and the last time I looked it was pretty hard to find one.
 
Solution
You will want to uninstall your current driver, and then after inserting the new GPU install the latest driver from Nvidia.

Your i5-2500K will do okay. You would benefit from overclocking it to the max. You would also benefit from an i7-2600K; or even better a whole new CPU/Mobo/RAM setup. You are correct that advancements in CPUs hadn't really come very far, but this year we saw a generational leap in architecture from AMD which includes SMT (aka hyper-threading), and a core increase from Intel. So, it wouldn't be a bad idea to upgrade your whole system if you had the money. If you didn't have the money, you could still gain a good bit of performance from just the GTX 1080.

I know AC Origins still put a pretty good load on my...
A GTX 1080 for example will run in PCIE 2.0, it will just not run at optimal performance do to the smaller bandwidth. However, this is almost negligible because a GTX 1080 barely saturates the bandwidth of PCIE 2.0

I'd go with a GTX 1080, it would be worlds better than RX 580 in SLI.

What are the rest of your system specs?
 
Sep 15, 2018
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I've got an i5-2500K and 8GB of RAM, I think it was Corsair, I don't remember the speed but I would have picked the best my MB could handle then. Also a 128GB OCZ Agility 3, and a few 1TB Samsung drives in RAID. All cutting edge stuff from 2011, haha.

Everything has been going great over the last 7 years, but Assassin's Creed Origins definitely struggles. It might just be that I've been playing things that don't require a ton of muscle, but even Fallout 4 ran fine.
 
Sep 15, 2018
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Also, I can't remember the last time I upgraded a video card only, when it got to that point I usually just specced out a new system, hardware improvements and game requirements seem like they used to advance a lot more quicker than lately.

When I replace this, do I need to uninstall the current driver first like I used to, or will the Geforce Experience application and Windows 7 just figure out what's going on?
 
You will want to uninstall your current driver, and then after inserting the new GPU install the latest driver from Nvidia.

Your i5-2500K will do okay. You would benefit from overclocking it to the max. You would also benefit from an i7-2600K; or even better a whole new CPU/Mobo/RAM setup. You are correct that advancements in CPUs hadn't really come very far, but this year we saw a generational leap in architecture from AMD which includes SMT (aka hyper-threading), and a core increase from Intel. So, it wouldn't be a bad idea to upgrade your whole system if you had the money. If you didn't have the money, you could still gain a good bit of performance from just the GTX 1080.

I know AC Origins still put a pretty good load on my i7-7700K. More so than any other game. I had to upgrade my CPU cooler just to keep it from reaching 85C while playing.
 
Solution