I'm quite anxious to get a new GPU and upgrade from my current GTX 1070 as it's not giving me the performance I want in games.
Since I'm stuck indoors at the moment I've been eyeing up RTX cards (and VR headsets), but am trying to hold off until the 30-series is here.
(related: the prices those Cyberpunk 2077 RTX 2080 Tis are going for on eBay is ridiculous)
I'm quite torn over what to do about hardware for next gen. I did a new system build about three years ago with:
- Ryzen 1700X
- 32GB 2933MT/s ECC RAM
- 8GB GTX 1070
- 1TB 960 Evo NVMe
This has been great for non-game performance; video editing etc. A clear upgrade over my i5-2500K system.
And it's been a solid performer in
some games. The 1700X nearly doubled my frame rate in
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. In the most stressful area of the game it was dropping to 50 FPS on the 2500K and is at 92 FPS with the 1700X.
But most games have not benefited nearly that much - including some of the games I specifically built this system for, like
Dishonored 2, and some games have performed badly; e.g.
Vampyr which was heavily bottlenecked by the CPU.
I'm thinking I could probably have held out with my 2500K a bit longer if I had only upgraded the GPU. Only 3-4 years before a completely new build is a lot shorter than usual for me.
I'm not sure whether I want to keep the existing hardware and upgrade the CPU to Zen 3 later this year, or wait to do a new build on a new platform and consider a switch back to Intel.
If it were not for AMD chasing higher prices with their new CPUs, upgrading would have been the clear option.
But instead of offering twice as many cores as the competition for the same price, as was the case with my 1700X (8c16t for the price of 4c4t from Intel), they've gone down the path of charging more for more cores now that they're more competitive.
I probably will end up upgrading the CPU this year, to hold me over until DDR5 and PCIe 5 are here.
I'm really wanting something faster than an NVMe SSD for next-gen.
The 960 Evo is honestly a very minor upgrade over SATA SSDs except for large sequential file reads/writes (mainly copying files between SSDs).
I'm hoping that Optane prices will come down significantly with second generation drives, because those seem like the real upgrade path from SATA SSDs - especially Optane DIMMs.
I'm also curious to see how things shake out with file compression. It's possible that AMD will have something on-chip for file compression with the new Zen 3 platform.
It's unlikely, but if Microsoft were to do something like release a PCIe card with their decompression hardware and an M.2 slot, I wouldn't hesitate to buy it. No matter how fast your SSD is, compression can make it faster.
There's a lot of extra hardware in next-gen consoles that make me wonder how things will compare to high-end PCs once it's actually being used by games. Brute-force with faster hardware is not always the best approach.
My system pauses at boot for Ram training for 20-30 seconds (based on my research to this point) which wasn't the case in the first year or so I had it. Other than that, I've been pretty happy with my system.
Memory training is not something that should be happening every time you boot the system.
That sounds more like it's an unstable memory overclock which is having to retry several times before it POSTs.