GPU upgrade for Ultra

[Hellshout]

Greetings folks.

Been reading on GPUs for weeks now. My friend says to just buy one and be done with it, but I want to get the best for my money as I'm not too fond of spending 400E on a GPU only for it to be mediocre 2 years later. I play at 1080p.

Anyway, I'm currently on z87, G3258 at 4.1 and R9 280X. I'm play on 5 because when I turn it up to 6-7 the GPU fans start to spin a lot and I don't like the noise.
I wanted to change to the new Ryzen comp, but I play only WoW, so I can't justify the difference. I'm aiming to get a used/refurbished i5 4690k and OC it to as much as possible. I'm going to be using a Scythe Fuma with 3 fans for it. I could buy a Deepcool Maelstrom 240, but it's 20E more and I think I'd rather spend it on the GPU. I also read AIOs are much louder than Air Coolers. My 212 barely makes noise and it has 2 fans.

Anyway, as for GPU I have the following in my mind:
GTX 1060 6gb
GTX 980ti
RX580 I the miners will stop buying all the cards
CF R9 280x
GTX 1050ti

Here's what I'm thinking, the 1060 is very good and should last me. The 980ti can be SLIed, so maybe in 2 years if I'd need it, I could buy another one and SLI it if I ever play smth else than WoW. The RX580 looks good and it's also CF, same as 980ti, later on bla bla. The R9 280x CF is more budget oriented, but could be a decent alternative if I can play it on Ultra and not spend 300E on other GPUs. I think I can get one for 100E. Would need to upgrade my 550W PSU, but I can use the new one in the future, so it's not quite a loss.

What do you guys recommend?
Thanks a lot.

A small rant at the end. This mining shit has to stop. The 3 best websites where I can buy GPUs here have only TWO 1060s left. Freaking TWO!!!!! And ofc some buffed up price. /rant

[teamkiller]

Get a GTX 1070, its price has only bumped about 25$ with the mining scene. It will handle 99.9% of games at 1080p and is great for 1440p and solid for 4k. I do not expect the 1070 to fall off at least at 1080p for at least 5 years maybe longer. Its a solid investment at 400$

[Appleson]

RX580 has the best price-performance ratio but you will probably need 550w PSU for it.
I got 1060 6GB and im happy with it, cant play on Ultra in raids and Suramar, but that is not the problem of graphic card but how poorly is WoW optimized.
As for 1070 it is a bit expensive.

[teamkiller]

RX580 has the best price-performance ratio but you will probably need 550w PSU for it.
I got 1060 6GB and im happy with it, cant play on Ultra in raids and Suramar, but that is not the problem of graphic card but how poorly is WoW optimized.
As for 1070 it is a bit expensive.

Normally, i'd agree to the rx580 being the best price to performance. However, with the cryptocurrency mining boom, the RX cards have all shot up in price.... had a friend who bought his for 250 6 months ago, sold them for 300 this weekend used... The 1060 6gb is a great card as is the 3gb variant. For a card to last you will want the higher VRAM capacity so either a 1060 @6Gb or the gtx 1070. so 280 on new for the 1060 or 420 @ bestbuy for the 1070 (this apparently jumped over the weekend again..... this nonsense needs to stop already)

[Lathais]

To those of you that responded, did you not see where he said the only game he plays is WoW?

First of all, your GPU is already more than capable of Ultra in WoW. A 750ti is capable of maxing out WoW on Ultra. If you buy anything at all, get the 1050ti and that's already overkill for WoW.

Second, no matter what you do to your GPU, your min FPS will pretty much remain unchanged, as that is really determined by your CPU. Granted, WoW does not really need more cores/threads than what you have, but if you are running backround tasks, likely some end up on the core that is running WoWs primary thread and slowing it down.

In short, you don't need a new GPU. You either need to run less background tasks and clean up your system and use less add-ons, or you need a new CPU/Motherboard. A GPU will not have much of an effect on WoW in your situation. I've seen it here hundreds of times before where people come in AFTER having bought their new GPU and then come wondering what is wrong when their brand spanking new xx80ti is not running the game any better than their old GPU.

[Blueobelisk]

Get a GTX 1070, its price has only bumped about 25$ with the mining scene. It will handle 99.9% of games at 1080p and is great for 1440p and solid for 4k. I do not expect the 1070 to fall off at least at 1080p for at least 5 years maybe longer. Its a solid investment at 400$

Does that mean you think a 1060 6 GB will be phased out sooner?

[Oftenwrongsoong]

Priority for you to upgrade/spend money:
1. CPU
2. Memory
3. GPU

In that order.

For GPU, you shouldn't need more than a 1060 to be honest. But with how intense the new zones are (i.e., Suramar), you need a fairly beefy processor to keep the FPS playable on Ultra.

However, even if you got the 1080Ti route you will be still be bottle-necked by your CPU unless you upgrade it.

[thatmikeguy]

If you think you will want to play the next expansion with it, I would get nothing less than a 1070. They may bump up DirectX then.

[Lathais]

He only plays WoW.

Get a 1060 and better CPU.

- - - Updated - - -



Yeah if you want low fps. The game is CPU bound as you say, but there's diminishing returns at the higher level, not this low level card. Unless you're thinking ultra preset 7 and not ultra preset 10.

Nope, I mean at 10 and getting 60+ FPS except in CPU-Bound. A 750ti is more than capable of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUl0nRnyvEY
Sure looks like low FPS to me. Even when flying around up high(which is a CPU Bound situation due to the massive number of draw calls that must be made when you fly that high) he is staying above 60 FPS with a 750ti in a CPU bound situation. You can find tons of other videos of people doing the same thing. WoW does not need much graphics wise, especially for 1080p. If we were talking 1440p here, yeah, you'd need more than a 750ti. I doubt a guy running a G3258 has a 1440p monitor though.

His current GPU is more powerful than a 750ti, so it can do the same thing. If he's getting low FPS, I would say it's due to his CPU, but he has a modern Pentium. Since WoW does not make proper use of multiple cores/threads and the IPC is the same in a given generation from Pentium on up to i7, his CPU should be more than capable as well. He likely has some other issue going on. But yeah, let's just tell him to throw money at it and buy new stuff.

@OP, do you have render scale turned up? Shadows on? What Add-Ons are you running? One of those is likely the culprit for your low FPS and a new GOU won't fix it. A new CPU might help handle those tasks better, letting you leave them alone though.

[ComputerNerd]

You will get diminishing returns on higher settings.
Some will get a lot more demanding for very little to no discernable improvements in appearance.
Look at your current settings, and see what you can turn down.
Shadows have historically been a CPU hog for instance.

[Hellshout]

Wow so many answers. Thanks guys.

Well I'm getting a 4690k clocked as much as possible, I hope over 4.5 gig.
The card that I have is weird. I tried a small OC tonight, all went well no crashed, but in WoW I tried a 6/10 and the card went full 90 deg, fans at 100%. Went back to 5, same shit. Restarted WoW, still maxed out. I'm going to change the thermal paste on it these days, I never liked it's temps.
I care only for raid fps. I did a guldan 30 once, got a lot of small freezes.
My main issue is that I don't want to spend so much money on a rig that I will change in ~2 years. The 1070 looks very nice, but I'll never used it at max potential. And here it's 400$ used... The gaming industry gone wild lately, people asking for huge sums for old cards... I saw an R9 280x like mine for 300$. I was thinking of asking for 80$...

I guess I might try a 1050ti if I can't find a decent priced 1060 6gb. I'm not paying 1070 money for a 1060.

I have 8 gb 2200mhz ram and 550W gold PSU.

Thanks for all the help guys.

[Lathais]

This is Ultra preset 7 -- Look a the date of the video.

Also, while I don't need to even say this because of the above^, I don't care about old content expansions before the 750 Ti was even out, I want to see new content done on this card. Dungeons aren't a good indication because view distance rendering OR OLD Dalaran is incredibly limited to the instance space and old graphics. I can pop in my 460 in the content in those areas and be just fine as well.

Show me a 750 Ti on Ultra 10 in new content. Not 7, which was in my original post.

Here's one where he hovers right around 60 in a 25-man raid. Yeah, there are dips to the mid-40s, but that's pretty normal and mostly the fault of the CPU. Granted, he does not show his settings.

Here's another guy, in a raid, on Ultra with a 750ti. His does drop quite a bit lower, but still stays above 30 and is close to 60 at times.

The OPs card is stronger than a 750ti. He does not need a new graphics card.

Edit: Oops, forgot to paste the links and already closed them. You can go to youtube and search it yourself. It's commonly accepted around here though, because we know it to be true. A 750ti can handle the game at max settings as long as you have a CPU that can. Once you have at least that, not going to get more performance out of it.

I think the OPS problem though is that while yeah, lower end cards can handle the game, they get pretty noisy doing so and that's what's bothering him. A 1050ti should solve that issue though, as it's definitely more than capable of maxing out the game if a 750ti is.

[Blueobelisk]

My main issue is that I don't want to spend so much money on a rig that I will change in ~2 years. The 1070 looks very nice, but I'll never used it at max potential. And here it's 400$ used... The gaming industry gone wild lately, people asking for huge sums for old cards... I saw an R9 280x like mine for 300$. I was thinking of asking for 80$...

I guess I might try a 1050ti if I can't find a decent priced 1060 6gb. I'm not paying 1070 money for a 1060.

Word. You typed out exactly how I feel. I have a thread of my own for a build that I want to make. It's $590 with tax for everything but the RAM and GPU. Tack on another $120 for the RAM, and it's like $710 total without the GPU. I wanted it to be sub $1000 since that seems right for the build, so like a $290 GPU would be perfect.

There is no $290 GPU. 1070s are expensive. 1060s 6 GB are sold out on newegg and expensive ($310+) elsewhere. I really want this red MSI 1060 6 GB to match my color scheme but it's sold out. I don't really want to pay too high prices so even I'm considering bumming it with a 1050 TI for sub $150 and just dealing with it.

[Hellshout]

Word. You typed out exactly how I feel. I have a thread of my own for a build that I want to make. It's $590 with tax for everything but the RAM and GPU. Tack on another $120 for the RAM, and it's like $710 total without the GPU. I wanted it to be sub $1000 since that seems right for the build, so like a $290 GPU would be perfect.

There is no $290 GPU. 1070s are expensive. 1060s 6 GB are sold out on newegg and expensive ($310+) elsewhere. I really want this red MSI 1060 6 GB to match my color scheme but it's sold out. I don't really want to pay too high prices so even I'm considering bumming it with a 1050 TI for sub $150 and just dealing with it.

I'm also considering a 970, there's a guy exchanging with lower cards + difference. I don't mind buying used parts as long as they work. My R9 was refurbished, used it for 2 years now. I spent @130 on it. If I sell it for 80, I lost 50 bucks in 2 years. That's crazy. But spending 400 on a card to get 250 in 2 years, meh.
I built my z87 deluxe, g3258+212, R9 280x, 8gb hyper fury, 550W gold PSU and Antec case for @600$ 2 years ago.

Edit: some guy is selling mining rigs with 6 rx580 each. He has 22 rigs... This is outrageous... We cant buy shit because of this crap.

[moremana]

The 4690 and 4790k's always ran hot, 90 is acceptable but in a OC you really need to pay attention to vcore, z97 and z87 boards always upped the vcore too much.

Grab Intels XTU and use that, read the instructions and once you find a good OC, write down the settings and apply it to the bios and disable Intels XTU OC on boot.

EDIT: and ignore everyone telling you to spring 400 on a 1070...ffs its wow, you dont need anything over a 1050TI, I would keep the 750 until Volta comes out.

[teamkiller]

Does that mean you think a 1060 6 GB will be phased out sooner?

No, for wow only, (i always believe people will play other games) 1060 is more than enough even for the next expac. That is assuming blizzard goes with the usual formula and does not overhaul the entire engine. If you are looking for something that will last longer with just about everything, the 1070 should do it.

Ex: you decide you want to play a current AAA title, the 1060 is more than enough for 1080p. Say about 2 or 3 years you find another AAA title you want to play, the 1060 may lag a little behind (have to play on high instead of ultra) while the 1070 will be able to play on ultra. The 1070 is around 50% gain over the 1060 @6b. So power wise they are almost perfect scale up right now price to performance. If you only ever do play wow/Esports games, really the 1050ti/10603gb is truly enough.

This will ultimately come down how much you want to spend now or later.

[Blueobelisk]

GPU Question: Which is better, an MSI GeForce GTX 1060 Gaming X 3 GB for $274 or a 1060 Gaming 6 GB for $265? (For my Ryzen 1600 build.)

Is the 3 GB with an X better than a 6 GB without the X?

[Lathais]

GPU Question: Which is better, an MSI GeForce GTX 1060 Gaming X 3 GB for $274 or a 1060 Gaming 6 GB for $265? (For my Ryzen 1600 build.)

Is the 3 GB with an X better than a 6 GB without the X?

I am pretty sure the X only refers to the cooler or factory OC MSI puts on it. As far as nVidia goes there are only 2 GPUs, the 1060 3GB and the 1060 6GB. The 3GB has a few other things cut from it as well. If the 6GB is cheaper, definitely grab it. You don't need a fancy GPU Cooler designed for the higher end cards on a 1060, unless you just want bragging rights over other 1060 owners, but I don't think anyone is buying a 1060 for bragging rights.

[WhippWhapp]

I have a 3770k @ 4.6, 16gb of 2133mhz, ssd and a GTX 1080.

With sliders @ 7 fps still drops below 60 in Suramar.

WoW is very poorly coded, ultra @ 10 is not realistic goal at this point.

[Blueobelisk]

I am pretty sure the X only refers to the cooler or factory OC MSI puts on it. As far as nVidia goes there are only 2 GPUs, the 1060 3GB and the 1060 6GB. The 3GB has a few other things cut from it as well. If the 6GB is cheaper, definitely grab it. You don't need a fancy GPU Cooler designed for the higher end cards on a 1060, unless you just want bragging rights over other 1060 owners, but I don't think anyone is buying a 1060 for bragging rights.

Ahhhhh thanks for the info. I had google'ed the difference but didn't know if the OCing was actually useful.