[SOLVED] Want to upgrade GPU, not sure if I should upgrade monitor first.

Oct 14, 2019
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Hello everyone, I am very new to building PCs and have just started to put together a nice one. I have a decent motherboard, 16 GB ram, Ryzen 7 2700x processor and a GTX 760 GPU. I run games on my 55" 4k monitor 30 hz. I am looking to upgrade my GPU in the coming months since its pretty weak in this day and age, new games like The Outer Worlds and even older ones like Dark Souls 3 top out in visual quality at about mid settings, and also display some strange screen tearing/ fuzziness whenever the camera moves side to side. My question is whether it will be more important to upgrade my GPU, or my monitor since the refresh rate is so low. My GPU makes things look good, but no where near great and struggles intensely with 4k resolutions, my fear is that I will upgrade my GPU just to find that my TV cannot keep up with it, please shoot your loads of wisdom all over me.
 
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Yep, it looks like that screen should support 60Hz input at 4K, provided you use the HDMI 2.0 ports (it appears to have one or more 1.4 ports too) but again, you will likely need a new graphics card for that.

Around the $400 level, assuming you are looking at US prices, there is the Nvidia RTX 2060 SUPER and the RTX 2070, along with the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT. The RTX 2070 SUPER is typically around $500.

In terms of performance, the standard 2070 is only slightly faster than the 2060 SUPER (no more than 5%), so I wouldn't pay more than $20 extra for one. At close to the same price it should be the better option though. The 2070 SUPER should be around 10-15% faster than the standard 2070, though whether that's worth close to $100...

Lutfij

Titan
Moderator
When asking for an upgrade advice, we first need to know what you're currently working with. That is, it's full system's specs. List them like so:
CPU:
Motherboard:
Ram:
SSD/HDD:
GPU:
PSU:
Chassis:
OS:

How old is the PSU?

If you want to upgrade the monitor/display as well, we're going to need your current display's make and model as well.
 
Nov 30, 2018
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When asking for an upgrade advice, we first need to know what you're currently working with. That is, it's full system's specs. List them like so:
CPU:
Motherboard:
Ram:
SSD/HDD:
GPU:
PSU:
Chassis:
OS:

How old is the PSU?

If you want to upgrade the monitor/display as well, we're going to need your current display's make and model as well.

I have the same question since you broke it down. I was curious to ask what would I need in order to upgrade my graphics card from a 970GTX to potentially 2070 Super (if too much I can step it down a notch and stick to a 1660 GTX TI).

my current specs:
I7 5800k processor
Motherboard: GA-X99-UD4 Gigabyte Socket LGA 2011-3 Intel X99 Express Chipset Xeon E5-1600

Ram: 16GB
PSU: 850w - bought about a year ago.
HDD

would this be compatible with a 2070 super? Or would I need to upgrade my processor? If upgrade processor which processor?
 
Oct 14, 2019
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CPU: Ryzen 7 2700x
Motherboard: b450M+ gaming
Ram: 16 GB DDr4
SSD/HDD: 128 gb SDD
GPU: GTX 760
PSU: Neutron 650W (yes I know)
Chassis: I forget
OS: Windows 10

The PSU as well as the entire system are only about two months old, I've just thrown it together. The only that I've had for a while is the GPU, I got it used a while ago but its usage hasnt been crazy.
 
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(yes I know)
: D

Running recent games at native 4K will be too much for a GTX 760, even if you are only trying to push 30fps. In my opinion, native 4K is not really worth targeting at this point, as pushing four times the pixels of 1080p requires very high-end hardware to do reasonably well, all for just a somewhat sharper image. 1080p and 1440p screens are a lot more reasonable in terms of the hardware required to get decent frame rates on them. Upscaling one of those lower resolutions to a 4K screen might also be worth considering, though 30Hz still isn't going to be ideal.

What model television is it? Do you happen to know whether it supports higher refresh rates given the proper connection? HDMI 2.0 and higher can potentially support 4K at up to 60Hz, but a GTX 760 is a bit older and only has HDMI 1.4, so it's possible that the 30Hz limitation might be down to your graphics card, and a newer card might support higher refresh rates on that screen.

And how much were you considering spending for the upgrades?

I have the same question since you broke it down. I was curious to ask what would I need in order to upgrade my graphics card from a 970GTX to potentially 2070 Super (if too much I can step it down a notch and stick to a 1660 GTX TI).
You should probably make a new thread for your question, or else people will lose track of which system is being discussed. It is worth pointing out that there are a number of current-generation cards in between a 2070 SUPER and a 1660 Ti though. Namely, the 2060, the 2060 SUPER and the 2070. Also, the Radeon RX 5700 and 5700 XT from AMD.

And do you mean the "i7-5820K"? If you are targeting a higher resolution like 4K (or even 1440p), then the per core performance of that processor should not be a significant limitation for any of these cards, and it still has a good number of cores and threads, so I wouldn't be concerned about upgrading it. Graphics card performance would be your major limiting factor at those resolutions, so you would probably want the fastest card you were willing to buy. If you are only targeting 1080p on a 144+Hz screen though, then CPU performance may play a bit more of role when paired with a high-end card.
 
Oct 14, 2019
19
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10
: D

Running recent games at native 4K will be too much for a GTX 760, even if you are only trying to push 30fps. In my opinion, native 4K is not really worth targeting at this point, as pushing four times the pixels of 1080p requires very high-end hardware to do reasonably well, all for just a somewhat sharper image. 1080p and 1440p screens are a lot more reasonable in terms of the hardware required to get decent frame rates on them. Upscaling one of those lower resolutions to a 4K screen might also be worth considering, though 30Hz still isn't going to be ideal.

What model television is it? Do you happen to know whether it supports higher refresh rates given the proper connection? HDMI 2.0 and higher can potentially support 4K at up to 60Hz, but a GTX 760 is a bit older and only has HDMI 1.4, so it's possible that the 30Hz limitation might be down to your graphics card, and a newer card might support higher refresh rates on that screen.

And how much were you considering spending for the upgrades?

My TV is a Sceptre u550cv-u 55", I've just looked up the refresh rate on the manufacturers website and it is 60Hz, but on my display settings in windows it says 30Hz, so I guess you're right about that? Is my current hardware set up strong enough to accommodate a high end graphics card? One that will look noticably better than a ps4?

As for price range, I dont want to go too much higher than 400, maybe 500 for the GPU. I'd rather not shell out a bunch for another PSU as well but if you recommend that I will
 
Yep, it looks like that screen should support 60Hz input at 4K, provided you use the HDMI 2.0 ports (it appears to have one or more 1.4 ports too) but again, you will likely need a new graphics card for that.

Around the $400 level, assuming you are looking at US prices, there is the Nvidia RTX 2060 SUPER and the RTX 2070, along with the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT. The RTX 2070 SUPER is typically around $500.

In terms of performance, the standard 2070 is only slightly faster than the 2060 SUPER (no more than 5%), so I wouldn't pay more than $20 extra for one. At close to the same price it should be the better option though. The 2070 SUPER should be around 10-15% faster than the standard 2070, though whether that's worth close to $100 more is up to you to decide.

The Radeon 5700 XT costs about the same as a 2060 SUPER or 2070, but is typically a bit faster on average in today's games. There's also the 5700 (non-XT) for around $350, with performance just a little behind the 2060 SUPER. The Nvidia 20-series cards do support some extra features like hardware acceleration for raytraced lighting effects not present on the 5700 and 5700 XT though, but even with acceleration, enabling those effects causes too much of a performance hit to be practical on today's graphics cards at native 4K resolution. It's more of a feature for 1080p rendering at this time. Though again, having games upscale from a lower resolution like 1080p or 1440p is a feature you may still want to utilize with the most demanding games, and both AMD and Nvidia have recently added sharpening options in their drivers to help restore some of the sharpness lost from upscaling.

And compared to a GTX 760, these cards around the $400 price point should offer at least several times the graphics performance at higher resolutions, so any of them should be a substantial upgrade over what you have now.

As for the PSU, I haven't really heard of that brand, so my guess would be that it's probably not particularly good. I would be mainly concerned about it potentially failing and wrecking a $400 GPU.
 
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