With the imminent drop of price from the 1080, should I upgrade my CPU or Graphics card?

[Wahw11]

Current build:
-MSi GTX 970 4GB,
-i5-4460
-8GB

I am a serious gamer, looking to play some FPS's at 144. My question is, should I first upgrade my CPU, (If so, which generation is the most valuable for someone who is looking to keep up with the newest titles) or should I wait for the 1080ti to drop its price? Not interested in RTX quite yet.

 

[dontlistentome]

For 'serious' gaming you're looking at a new CPU, new motherboard, new DDR4 system ram(16gb), and the videocard. Since you have a 970 now, if it were my choice I'd get the CPU/motherboard/ram first, then just use the 970 until I got the upgraded videocard. Your high and average framerate might not raise up much, but you should have less stutter and the framerate won't drop as much with the better CPU.

 

[t99]

Yeah, get the cpu first. If you play and stream you might like the 2600/x or 2700x, but just gaming only the 8600k is a nice option.

https://us.hardware.info/reviews/8425/16/amd-ryzen-5-2600x-vs-intel-core-i5-8600k-the-best-gaming-cpu-in-the-year-2018-conclusion


The above review is very well done and as you can see overall the difference is minimal. This is the x though which boost to around 4.0 on all cores when gaming. The 8600k can oc to 5.0 to give it more of an edge. The real deal though is saving 90$ and do a safe modest oc on a 2600 to 3.9 on all cores which would come very close to the x performance from those benchmarks. The normal boost is 3.75, a lot of boards having a safe built in gaming boost to hit 3.85 with no tweaking.

just moved from a i5 4460 to ryzen 2600 with the same rx480 and everything just runs better. I was torn between this and a 8600k, but I multi task a lot and also do music production.