Which to upgrade first?

[Tigris55lev]

Currently i have a FX 8350 with a GTX 970 and 16Gb RAM.

I should upgrade my CPU (to a i5 8600k) or my GPU (to a GTX 1070Ti or RTX 2070) first? Maybe anything else?

I want to use it for gaming. (Any modern game at 1080p Ultra/High at 60 FPS+)

How bad the bottleneck will be with the GPU?
(I know i have to buy a new MOBO and RAM with the CPU)

 

[Kasper Jorgensen]

I would start by upgrading the CPU. The GTX 970 should still be somewhat capable of playing games at 1080p.

 

[stdragon]

I'd go for the GTX 1070Ti first as most games are GPU bound, not so much CPU limted. At some point, the CPU will become a major bottleneck, but if you must pick only one, always the GPU first for gaming purposes.

 

[jaslion]

Currently i have a FX 8350 with a GTX 970 and 16Gb RAM.

I should upgrade my CPU (to a i5 8600k) or my GPU (to a GTX 1070Ti or RTX 2070) first? Maybe anything else?

I want to use it for gaming. (Any modern game at 1080p Ultra/High at 60 FPS+)

How bad the bottleneck will be with the GPU?
(I know i have to buy a new MOBO and RAM with the CPU)

Cpu first. Your 8350 can easily be holding back your current gpu in cpu heavy games.

 

[stdragon]

Currently i have a FX 8350 with a GTX 970 and 16Gb RAM.

I should upgrade my CPU (to a i5 8600k) or my GPU (to a GTX 1070Ti or RTX 2070) first? Maybe anything else?

I want to use it for gaming. (Any modern game at 1080p Ultra/High at 60 FPS+)

How bad the bottleneck will be with the GPU?
(I know i have to buy a new MOBO and RAM with the CPU)

Cpu first. Your 8350 can easily be holding back your current gpu in cpu heavy games.

Both the Xbox One and PS4 both have an 8 core CPU that runs less than HALF the clock speed of his FX 8350. And all three CPUs are AMD x86 CPU.

That CPU should be more than sufficient for gaming on a PC.

 

[Kasper Jorgensen]

Currently i have a FX 8350 with a GTX 970 and 16Gb RAM.

I should upgrade my CPU (to a i5 8600k) or my GPU (to a GTX 1070Ti or RTX 2070) first? Maybe anything else?

I want to use it for gaming. (Any modern game at 1080p Ultra/High at 60 FPS+)

How bad the bottleneck will be with the GPU?
(I know i have to buy a new MOBO and RAM with the CPU)

Cpu first. Your 8350 can easily be holding back your current gpu in cpu heavy games.

Both the Xbox One and PS4 both have an 8 core CPU that runs less than HALF the clock speed of his FX 8350. And all three CPUs are AMD x86 CPU.

That CPU should be more than sufficient for gaming on a PC.

You cannot compare a console APU to a computer CPU. The FX8350 is really not up for the task of playing modern games.

 

[jaslion]

Currently i have a FX 8350 with a GTX 970 and 16Gb RAM.

I should upgrade my CPU (to a i5 8600k) or my GPU (to a GTX 1070Ti or RTX 2070) first? Maybe anything else?

I want to use it for gaming. (Any modern game at 1080p Ultra/High at 60 FPS+)

How bad the bottleneck will be with the GPU?
(I know i have to buy a new MOBO and RAM with the CPU)

Cpu first. Your 8350 can easily be holding back your current gpu in cpu heavy games.

Both the Xbox One and PS4 both have an 8 core CPU that runs less than HALF the clock speed of his FX 8350. And all three CPUs are AMD x86 CPU.

That CPU should be more than sufficient for gaming on a PC.

Just look at taskmanager in game and you'll see that any amd fx cpu in todays AAA games and even AAA games from a couple years ago are constantly at 100% or close (not every game supports 8 cores so sometimes it's just a couple cores at 100%). Take battlefield 1 for example. On an fx 8350 that game will most of the time struggle to keep a stable fps and keep above 60fps in big battles whilst a gtx 970 is more than capable.

The reason consoles can (even they have issues with keeping a steady framerate) is because they can be optimized for since it's 1 set of hardware. Core 1-8 can be specifically instructed as to what to handle and the developers have more access to the resources. Something that only recently has started to happen with dx12 and vulkan on the computer.

I have personal experience with it. I sold my fx 8320 + 16gb of ram and r9 280x system to replace it with a i7 4770 prebuilt with I got for cheap and slapped in the r9 280x I kept from the old system and experienced a good boost in framerate in games like battlefield 4, gta V, ... simply because the fx was holding me back due to it's really weak single core performance.