Upgrade Considerations

Hi Guys,

I'm considering my next hardware upgrade, and basically on my budget im split between either a graphics card upgrade (I currently have a 1070Ti) to an 1080Ti or a Processor upgrade (i5-6600k), I dont want to upgrade my MB, which means a i5 7600k or i7 7700k?

Which one which choice would give me the better performance improvement

Processor 6600k to 7600k

Processor i5 6600k to i7 7700k

Graphics card 1070ti to 1080ti?

Pushing the Odyssey's pixel count , my money would be on the 1080ti . I assume VAT considerations would dis-allow a like-performance 2070 super new vs a used 1080ti .

I was also wondering about a 2070 super, as well but I can get a 1080ti for 350-400GBP and the 2070 super clocks in at about 550+, as I dont play any games that supports ray tracing … it's money for functions I wont use and less (but faster) RAM... I couldn't work out if it was enough of an edge to be worth the money vs. just being "newer" tech

I would hold the upgrade and save some more to eventually get a new MB with the newest slots for further upgrades, afraid you wont see that much of an increase..

With those choices I'd go Graphics card 1070ti to 1080ti ....I went from 1080 >1080Ti and saw a difference ...your mileage may vary.

so I have been doing some perf monitoring , and the graphics card does seem to be the current bottle neck with a utilisation of 97% on RAM and 80-95% on processor, cpu utilisation rarely seems to take a single core above 40%... so I think the GPU route seems to be most likely to get a bang for my buck as it were

I have a 6700k and also looked at upgrading to a 7600k. Not a whole lot of improvement here, maybe 10% so I passed and went for the 1080ti (from a 1070). I think it was the right move.

You won't see CPU bottlenecks the way windows 10 distributes the load across cores. Look at your GPU utilization and if it drops to below ~80% then you know it's a CPU bottleneck. I've seen my GPU utilization drop to 50% (frames at 30fps) or less when looking at a crowded airfield, and as soon as I look at the sky the GPU utilization jumps up to 99% (frames jump up to 70 fps).

Near as I can tell, CPU and GPU render times are highly correlated for everything other than anti-aliasing. So, if dialing down Msaa and pd helps, you probably need more GPU. Otoh if everything is fine until you log in to a busy server, and dialing down your settings doesn't help, you probably need more CPU. If you can only do one, you have to figure out what you want to accomplish mainly.

I got quite a significant improvement in sustained throughput by dialling back the aliasing and PD, and bought a second hand EVGA 1080ti FTW, I will let this thread know when I have it installed and I have some benchmarks

so by upgrading to the 1080ti, I get a pretty constant 45 fps in most settings, where before I got 40-42, thats without over clocking the card , the card utilisation at about 70-75% shows me that any further improvements would only be achieved by upgrading the CPU