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980X Viability

james1701

james1701

Golden Member
Is a 980X still worth upgrading? I have a 7970ghz card in it now. My son is complaining of min frame drops in games. It currently has 6GB of memory installed. Should I upgrade the GPU or consider handing down my 3770 system and build myself a new rig.
 
Is it overclocked at all? Are the games running off an SSD? (Stalling on asset loads is one reason why minimum framerates can drop.) What games is it struggling in?
 
the only thing the x58 platform is missing is native sata 6gbps and that is easily remedied with a good sas card.

the 980x is still quite good.
 
Personally I would just sell it to some sucker out there and buy Skylake. No point keeping a chip that is barely beating a stock 2600K in MT and loses big in ST.
 
Your system will need a new GPU upgrade soon. You can buy fire-sale $200-225 R9 390/970 and sell the 7970. If this doesn't satisfy your son, you can always pass on the 3770J and build a new 6700/6800K rig in June. R9 390 also has Total War Warhammer game. That would make it a very cheap upgrade once these cards hit $200-225 in June.
 
No overclock, and mechanical drive. He plays a lot of Rust, and some Boarderlands 2 with some Fallout 4 mixed in right now. I could hand down my Sapphire Nitro Fury.

I think he also need a little more memory in the system too. Probably a new power supply would not hurt, Antec earth watts 550 is in it now.

He wants to start streaming to YouTube, so the extra 2 cores might come in handy.
 
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Double/triple the system memory, get a fat SSD, then watch for gpu deals on new cards. If the psu is decent you can probably get by considering the next release of midrange gpus will be very low power.
 
980x single thread performance is Core 2 era and not a ton of games (if any?) are going to take advantage of those six cores.

Not saying I know what would help better with minimum frame rates, but that CPU is definitely not great for gaming specifically anymore.
 
Insomniator said:
980x single thread performance is Core 2 era and not a ton of games (if any?) are going to take advantage of those six cores.

Not saying I know what would help better with minimum frame rates, but that CPU is definitely not great for gaming specifically anymore.
Click to expand...


We're entering DX12 era, so that 980x will have a second lease on life. Plus it's for his son or son's rig, why blow cash on something that doesn't really need to be upgraded?


Denithor said:
+1
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:thumbsup:
 
I have a friend with X58 and he had no issues keeping up in BF3 and BF4 multiplayer. It was overclocked to like 3.9 or something, but its a quad on an X58 board. I think fallout 4 has performance issues anyway doesn't it?
He would be better off with that 3770 and a Fury for sure though. That's a capable setup. Less than 8GB system ram can certainly cause some problems these days.
 
Well, I decided to split the difference. I ordered 12GB of memory, a 1TB Muskin Reactor SSD and an Asus MG278Q monitor. If AMD cuts prices week after next, I will pick up 2 Sapphire Fury to give him one, and put a second in my system.

The new monitor at a higher resolution should take some load off the CPU and put it on the GPU.
 
Good decision the new graphics cards will all be out (or at least announced) in the next 3 weeks. You can also very easily sell that x58 system for a decent return.
 
Also Nvidia cards have less CPU overhead with DX up till 11. 12, Mantle and Vulcan is a different story altogether.
 
980X is a good chip, should OC pretty well. Put that unlocked multi to work! You may need a better cooler.
 
I have an H100i that is not doing anything. Currently it has an original launch model H50. It works well. I could run it at 4.4Ghz, but that was pushing it.
 
Insomniator said:
980x single thread performance is Core 2 era and not a ton of games (if any?) are going to take advantage of those six cores.

Not saying I know what would help better with minimum frame rates, but that CPU is definitely not great for gaming specifically anymore.
Click to expand...

The single threaded performance of westmere is higher than Core 2.

That cpu needs an overclock and it should be fine.

One of the games he is playing is borderlands 2 and that runs fine on my rig.
 
FWIW a friend of mine moved his 7970 from a Q6600 OC rig with SSD and 8GB RAM to a i3-6100 OC (Skylake) with SSD and 16GB RAM and it was like he bought a whole new GPU. Frame time spikes disappeared and min and average fps went up huge. I was very surprised by the improvements.
 
OF course its blaszing fast,, only benchmarks will give you numbers, YOu want real world playing games. See how it goes. gl
 
Definitely put a good cooler on it and OC. It will run all the latest games fine with a good oc. Otherwise sell it and buy skylake or something.
 
the cpu definitely needs an overclock.

However westmere is very viable, and games which hog resources, that uses multipul cores.

The only issue i have with westmere tho is good luck finding a X58 board for reasonable price. You'll find out quickly if you need to piece a new sytem, it will be cheaper to get a i7-4790k + Z97 board over a good quality X58 board.
 
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