Recent upgrade. Still underperforming.

[baterax]

Hello!

So, I've recently upgraded my PC because my motherboard died. I seized the opportunity to improve on some things.

Old system:
http://pcpartpicker.com/list/NpX7rH

New upgraded system:
http://pcpartpicker.com/list/8BHtnn

So the old one originally had a HIS Radeon 9770 in it but the airline broke that when I brought it back from the US, and over here Nvidia is much easier to find so for the first time ever, I switched to the green team and went with an EVGA GTX 970.

Now, I have 2400MHz RAM and switched from AMD to Intel, and a Rampage V Extreme U3.1 motherboard and I feel like it's underperforming in games.

I've been messing around with BIOS settings and whatnot, and looking at some comparable benchmarks.

The questions I have:

- Is it time AND would it be worth it to upgrade to a 1080 (Not a Titan X because that's for SURE not worth it right now for the increase in performance over the 1080.... right?)? Or maybe even going back to the RED team? I mean I've seen the green team now has some advantages like G-Sync which apparently has been working better than Freesync, and Shadowplay which I will soon start using extensively so...

- I thought about adding a second 970 instead because cheaper, but as I understand, most games don't benefit from that. It'd make more sense if I was running more monitors, or a higher resolution monitor, right?

- Is my video card the bottleneck right now, or is there something else I should be doing, besides replacing it, to get more performance out of this system (as a reference, it's been running Witcher 3 and other current games like Crysis 3 at around 60FPS @ 1920x1080. I want MORE)

- Why the hell can't my RAM just run at its advertised speed of 2666MHz? Every time I check that, it's running at something slower like 2133. Today I ran a geekbench test and that said it was running at 1334MHz which... WHAT!?

- How much of a performance improvement would I get from say, switching my boot drive to a PCI-E M.2 SSD? Or maybe two, in RAID 0? I'm asking this one because as you can see, I'm starting to run out of SATA ports. Since most of my current SSDs are close to full, I'm expecting I'll have to actually swap some soon.

Help!
And thanks in advance.

 

[Isokolon]

- a 970 will run Crysis 3 at 1920x1060 with around 60FPS. for more you need to upgrade the video card.
here are 2 benchmarks including the 970 and other cards:

consider that these are the fps for ultra. tuning down some settings will have little to none visual effect, will result in a great fps gain though

a 1080 would be complete overkill for 1080p. an overclocked 1060 or 1070 should do


as for the RAM, everything above 2133MHz is reached via XMP in the bios,
simply activate XMP and set RAM to the speed it should run at

 

[baterax]

So it IS the video board then. And yeah I'm interested in overkill because I will soon move up to higher than 1080 resolutions.

 

[bmw-vision]

^Same as above. Remember RAM speed is displayed as half the advertised speed.
2x 1333 = 2666Mhz

http://www.gamespot.com/forums/pc-mac-linux-society-1000004/why-is-speccy-showing-my-ram-speed-at-half-capacit-29303729/

 

[baterax]

DOH! I always forget that!!! It's correct then. Ok cool hahaha

 

[baterax]

Now as far as which 1080 to get... How do you guys feel about that Zotac AMP+ Extreme?

 

[Isokolon]

honestly, get the cheapest 1080 with a decent cooler.
with boost 3.0 they all perform around the same

the Zotac cards are decent, as long as you don't overspend on them
when you can find an iChill or a Phoenix or an Armor G for 30-40$ less then there's no need to go for the AMP+ really

 

[baterax]

I like that card because it's hybrid, so I can use it air cooled but if I switch to water, I don't have to do anything to it... but yeah you make sense.