Is it time to upgrade?

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Aug 11, 2008
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Getting off topic in the cpu forum, but I believe the general consensus is that the 980 is not a good choice on price/performance. For nVidia, the best values in the mid/high end are the 970 or 980Ti, along with 290x/390/390x from AMD.
 

vissarix

Senior member
Jun 12, 2015
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OK, so I have a small slice of hat to eat. When I upgraded to the 780 last spring I didn't see an ENORMOUS benefit in my framerates which has led me to the closely held belief that my CPU is my bottleneck.

So, last night I loaded up DCS and played the Black Shark missions that give me the most grief with stuttering and ran MSI's afterburner in the background. Sure enough, my GPU hit 100% repeatedly while my CPU cores were just cruising along and not being too stressed at all.

So, I'm converted and while I still think I'd like an i7 I've made peace with the fact that my 780 6gb was likely a pretty poor purchase at the time and it should be first on my list to upgrade so the card went on Kijiji this morning.

With that said I'm a little gun-shy about spending the premium on a 980 as the difference in price between a 970 with an 1165 clock and a 980 with a similar clock is at least $200 Cdn, so would a 970 provide a reasonable bump or should I just sit on everything until the next gen video cards come out?

an i7 2600k is definitely a good choice if you dont want to spend on a new build...even with youtube tutorials you might be able to hit 4.5ghz+ easily, there is no dud cpu's just people who have no idea how to overclock.

you need to overclock the gtx 780 aswell, no need to spend $300+ on another gpu for slight performance increase...
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2014/06/17/asus_strix_gtx_780_oc_6gb_overclocking_review/5

and then eventually next year get a midrange gpu with titan x performance..