Question Upgrading to a 4k gaming system so I have 2 questions

rbogomolec

Honorable
Nov 16, 2017
97
10
10,545
I've been a very happy 1080p gamer so far, but now I bought a new TV and ofc 65" TVs are only available in 4k, sigh... Long story short, I wanna upgrade my old rig to have better picture quality, but only the GPU if possible and nothing extreme. My current rig is i5-9400f, 16GB RAM and a GTX 1660 6GB.

I've been researching the Internet for the past 4 hours and decided that the RTX 3070 would be something for me. I never play on Ultra settings and I never go beyond 60fps. As far as I've seen on the benchmarking sites, a 3070 should give me a smooth medium/high settings 60fps experience in all the games that I like. I plan to combine that with some undervolting to give me some 5-10'C lower temps and that should do it for me. I don't really wanna OC the GPU if I don't have to.

A 3070 Ti is out of the question cuz it's 100+ Euro more expensive here where I live and the difference is minimal as far as I can see in the reviews. I know that a 3080 "would be better for gaming at 4k" but it's too strong and too expensive for my needs.

So, let's say I go with the RTX 3070. Here are my questions which to which Google didn't find me an answer:

1. Can I trust the benchmarking sites and can a 3070 really run in 4k on medium/high while delivering steady 60fps? Cuz I know this GPU is meant for 1440p gaming in the first place. All the YouTube videos run tests only in 4k with everything on Ultra settings, so that didn't help me much.
2. I did a research on i5-9400f + RTX 3070 bottlenecking, and got some results that I don't understand. In all games that I tried benchmarking the result was something like GPU usage=100%, CPU usage=94%. Like, my CPU was getting bottlenecked, not the GPU. Is that something bad and will it compromise my 4k experience? I really don't wanna upgrade my CPU as well and if this CPU isn't good enough for 4k gaming then I'll just probably give up on upgrading my system. So please tell me it's a good CPU and that it'll do just fine ;)
 

KyaraM

Admirable
GPU running at 100% and CPU not is quite normal at 4K. I would be more worried about your CPU not being enough, honestly, because it really shouldn't be that stressed at 4K. You might want to look into an upgrade there, too, that CPU is a bit long in the tooth for high-end gaming. Even a 12100 has better gaming performance...

Personally, I wouldn't look at those two cards for 1440p. Minimum a 4070 there, really. That would be the most efficient card for that resolution, albeit most likely more expensive than the 3070 cards; it would definitely last you much longer, though. An RX 6950XT would be a few percent faster for a similar price, but at almost twice the power consumption, and with where energy prices currently are in Europe... also, worse Raytracing performance if you care about that. There are generally some rather cheap AMD cards around right now, the 6800XT would be another contender. But they are all less efficient, and even if you would get it for cheaper, the difference would be made up within a year and the AMD card more expensive the year after. Similar for the 3070s, btw. They don't provide good price/performance ratios nowadays and 8GB VRAM would be rough at 4K.

(Edited for typos)
 
Last edited:
Apr 14, 2023
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Can I trust the benchmarking sites

Eh...

and can a 3070 really run in 4k on medium/high while delivering steady 60fps?

While singing, even.

Cuz I know this GPU is meant for 1440p gaming in the first place.

Oh. It's a good card though. Does CAD, Mixer, Live media streaming and video encoding, pixelshading, decoding, programming, calculations, AI. It has more special cores relative to the amount of CUDAs it has than most RTXes, thermals are good, power usage too, clocks are pretty boostable too..

All the YouTube videos run tests only in 4k with everything on Ultra settings,

They might not have gotten the memo about the 1440p gaming gig.

so that didn't help me much.

Might have made clear that the RTX 3070 is a very nice GPU. Not only for 1440p gaming.

2. I did a research on i5-9400f + RTX 3070 bottlenecking, and got some results that I don't understand.

I don't think this is even a thing. Which would make that the bottleneck. 16 Gb of DRAM might cause VRAM overload in very heavy titles.
 
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