Upgrade or Buy new PC?

I'm planning to upgrade/buy a new pc in time for Witcher 3. I'm laying down a budget of $1,500.00

Since you guys have never steered me wrong. I figured I'd run this by you and get your feedback on what you think would be the better route:

The specs of the PC I'm planning to upgrade/replace is as follows:

Was looking good until I got down the the motherboard. Whoever recommended that motherboard certainly steered you wrong.

I would say just upgrade the GPUs and see if you're happy with performance. Also grab a decent size SSD, if you don't already have one.

Upgrade the gpu, and maybe a SSD and you will be all set.

Overclock + heatsink for cpu if you haven't already.

290x or 970gtx.

@C_Rule , @04dcarraher and @Bikouchu35

Graphics cards and SSD it is.

I've been looking at cards and I'm leaning more towards this one.

What do you guys think?

Waste of money, get 290 and OC it, you can get 2x 290s and a proper MOBO that supports it

@verbalfilth:

Buy a heatsink and OC the CPU as well.

Dont bother with the 290x, its price to performance ratio is not good. You can grab a GTX 970 for under $350 and outperform that 290x. And use 40% less power.

That VRam though...very tempting for a 4k+ res build if wanted to explore that option.

But you're right. I think for my current needs the 970 is more than enough. I ended up getting that.

@GTR12: and @Bikouchu35:

I know I could probably push my CPU above 4Ghz based off the averages people are pulling in on the 2600K. Not sure I want to OC my cpu just yet though. I've never really felt comfortable/confident in the whole thing really. The question is: is it really worth it at this point? Is it going to bottleneck my system at its current state? And, Should I decided to do it, I have the Corsair Hydro (H55) on my CPU which I think is sufficient for OCing if it comes down to it, unless you'd recommend something else.

Well there are some issues with the gtx 970 that it has performance loss when it hits its last 500 mb but still the gtx 970 does have a better price and the lower power consumption, it won't outperform this 290x though, not with this memory and that overclock.

Also if you ever plan on crossfiring this 290x he will have 8 gb and that will come in handy with that kind of horsepower.

There's somehting else you need to take into consideration as well. The sandy bridge 2600k will not support 3.0 and when you start crossfiring this card, you will lose performance. About 3 percent, trifire will about 5 percent. Quadfire around 7. You will lose performance with single cards as well, even with the 290x (or the gtx 970), about 1-2 percent. If you will buy a faster card, it will be more , just like you would start using multiple card options. So the higher you go, the more you will lose.

You could maybe solve it by upgrading to ivy bridge, but i'm not sure your motherboard will support pci 3.0. Normally it should because it's cpu dependent and your motherboard supports ivy bridge cpu's but even then it probably won't be worth it because the i7 2600k is still one of the fastest cpu's out there and when overclocked, no ivy (even overclocked) can touch it. That's because sandy bridge has such low temps and while slower clock for clock, it can overclock much higher. The fastest haswell (even overclocked) can barely match an i7-2600k (overclocked).

If i was you , i would really oc that i7-2600k , you don't even have to go that crazy, just overclock it to 4.5 ghz or even 4 gz. You can really use it in newer games and that chip is made for overclocking. The fastest haswell at stock is significantly faster than the 2600k at stock, but it also runs way hotter, so you it's time to throttle up that ratio, the chip is made for it.

To come back to the vga card, if you plan on crossfiring in the future you might want to take a look at that r9 290x but it's damn expensive, you're paying for that extra ram. But if you want to use AA at 4k, you will need it. The question is will you need AA at that resolution, since the resolution makes up for the aa then. Don't forget this is hitman absolution a last gen game. Skyrim doesn't need that much ram even with the same aa settings and a high res pack. Will newer games need more ram? probably yes. Will that 8 gb come in handy when playing 4k? probably yes

There's isn't much choice out there as well, The r9 280x isn't as fluent in crossfiring as the 290 version (which solved microstuttering on a hardware level) and nvidia is even more expensive, not only that the 780 series 6 gb are hard to find. Still, it doesn't seem you're going 4k pretty soon, so that gtx 970 will be more than enough, it will be enough to introduce you into 4k but not enough to go full throttle in it, even with sli. For that, multiple setups of that 290x 8gb are a much better option.

@verbalfilth:

There's 2 ways to look at your 2600k, the blunt way and the nicer way;

Why would you even get k chip if your not OC'ing? that's money wasted and it could have gone to an SSD or better GPU's, its stupid not to OC, you even have an aftermarket cooler so OC already!!!

Depending on what you play, your losing out on performance already, anywhere from 1% up to 20% for a CPU intensive game. We all have to learn OC somewhere and you have an easy chip to learn with (well all modern chips are easy IMO), so why not start now?

Noctua heatsink + X2 R9 290's or X2 GTX 970's.

Just plugged in my gtx 970

Dxtory recording and Tomb Raider running at all settings maxed: Min FPS 33.0, max FPS 60.4 average FPS 47.7

Card is as quiet as a mouse which is a huge change from the previous cards.

Feels like:

@verbalfilth:

Umm, I said OC the CPU, no-one said OC the card, not sure where you got that from.

OC'ing is easy, check in CPU-Z what volts you need at stock for CPU, remember that and set it to manual in UEFI, bump up multiplier by 1, restart PC and run Prime95 for 10 mins;

If it doesnt BSOD, go back to UEFI and raise multiplier by 1 again.

If it does BSOD, up the voltage by 0.05 and try again (dont go crazy with the voltage, you dont want a fried chip).

Keep doing that until you get to 4.2Ghz and post back with the voltage your using.

indeed, don't overclock the gpu , it is not needed.

Don't know where I got "card" from either.

I'll be doing some cable management to maximize airflow since its a mess in there, then I'll start overclocking tonight. I'll let you guys know how it goes.

Thanks again for all the help and suggestions everyone.

@verbalfilth:

Don't go above 4.2Ghz without posting back your volts, just so we know your doing it right.

And remember to run prime95 every time so you know its stable.

@GTR12:

No matter how much I toyed with the voltage in the bios, I still ended up with the same results so I'm sure I'm doing something wrong or overlooking something in the settings. I'll probably toy around with it some more tomorrow, But here are my results so far after running prime95 for 20-30 minutes:

@verbalfilth:

That's good for a 1st time OC, the max volts the 2600k recommended is 1.38 and PLL 1.9, did you already know this or not?

Take a 3dmark score at 4.2Ghz now, and go up to 4.3, 4.4 etc, assuming the temps stay below 80c (ideally as low as possible), then you figure out if that extra 100Mhz is increasing your score enough to justify the higher temps and extra voltage.

This.

Well, I toyed around with it some more and let it run under max loan for an hour. Its a slight improvement from last night's results but I think I might be able to get it higher....if I can figure all the parameters out and how they affect each other.