[SOLVED] Which upgrade path should I take?

[mike789]

Hello everyone,
My build is more or less 2 years old and even though I do not feel I should upgrade anything yet, for the past couple of weeks I've been researching a little bit new hardware, after all building PCs (I have built all of my friends systems also) is my favorite thing!
I'm an amateur I do it for hobby I just want to make them pretty and good in games.

My current setup is:
NZXT S340 Elite
Corsair 750W HX
Asus z270 - A Prime
i7-7700k (kraken x62)
GSkill TridentZ 16GB 3200
Palit SuperJetStream GTX 1080
Samsung 970evo (m2) 500GB
Samsung 860evo 500GB
Samsung 27CHG70

Option 1: Originally, I thought to wait for AMD to make a GPU that is at least 80% faster than my 1080. That way I could take advantage of the Freesync feature my monitor has also. However, when one plays at high framerates >72 @144hz everything seems smooth so it 's not such a big deal. A super 2080 would be more than fine also and I think the 7700k would handle it.

Option 2: Now that AMD is making good CPUs also, I wouldn't mind a new multi core processor (after all that's the thing now) and I would have to change m/b and CPU.

Option 3: Or wait one or two more years and do it like the previous time: m/b + cpu + gpu (thank God not ram again) .

Any suggestions welcome!!

 

[Darkbreeze]

Given your criteria, I would wait, with a caveat.

The caveat is, as you alluded to, your current CPU while still somewhat capable, is falling quickly behind in terms of physical cores AND game developers as well as those at Microsoft have been working furiously at optimizing things to take advantage of those cores so while in the past having more core or threads might not have offered a tremendous advantage on a lot of game engines or in Windows itself, that is rapidly changing. In light of that, even with your 1080 you might see a significant performance increase in just about anything you do with a higher core count CPU. The fact is, that aside from AMD's recent jump in single core performance over any of their past offerings (But still just about neck and neck with Intel) the advances in single core performance have been lackluster over the last four or so generations. Your Kaby lake CPU does not have a major IPC advantage over Haswell refresh and Coffee lake refresh does not have an enormous IPC advantage over Kaby lake.

So while there has been SOME advancement in that area, it's not earth shattering, but the optimization of multithreaded processing is where most of the leaps in performance have been coming from and unfortunately that i7 is somewhat limited being the same core count as the previous four or five i7 generations before it.

So that's something to consider for now.

All that being said, it might still be worth waiting another year to see what happens in terms of architectural advancements from both Intel and AMD if you think what you have is still doing what you need it to do.

As far as the graphics are concerned, you're going to REALLY want to wait if you want something with 80% more performance than your GTX 1080 because right now, nothing exists that offers an 80% increase in performance over that card and I would expect to not see anything like that for maybe two more generational cycles unless something wildly unexpected happens to fly out of the labs at Nvidia or AMD. And I really doubt it.

 

[mike789]

Thank you for the time you took to produce a full answer. I will wait for another year or so for m/b and cpu.

ps.now your best answer count is skylake XD