Upgrade Advice -- Should I keep my 6-core Sandy?

[Natalia]

Hey all,
Looking for a little advice on upgrading.

I am going to be upgrading my two 980 Ti's for the new 1080 Ti's that are coming out this month. However, I am unsure if I need to touch the rest of my system (or not).

My CPU and motherboard are several years old, but doesn't seem like anything significant has happened on that front, and I'm inclined to think that it would be a moot point in touching them, and that I would be better off waiting until 2018 to upgrade the CPU, motherboard, and RAM for when Coffee Lake comes out and there some shiny new 6-core CPUs to play with.


For reference what I use my workstation for:

• Software Development (UE4 and Unity)
• Image Processing
• Gaming (MMO's, ARPG's, FPS's)

[Ket]

Honestly, I don't see the point in upgrading anything in that system. Overclock your 980Tis and they will beat 1070s, quite likely OC'd 1070s as well, Maxwell 2 has better IPC than Pascal so doesn't need as high clocks to beat it. Only very slight advantage in some 1080Tis would be for the extra vRAM as those 980Tis OCd are still stupid fast, 6/8GB cards right now are quite ample even for 4k. The thing that looks most dated in that system is your RAM, but if you don't do anything that would see a noticeable gain stepping up to some faster memory then upgrading even that to something like DDR3 2400 or 2600 would be moot. You have a decent SSD as well.. I'd say you likely don't really need to consider any kind of GPU upgrade until Volta, and no system upgrade until what comes after Coffee Lake.

The most significant upgrade for you right now I'd say would be a PCI-E SSD, if you handle data thats large enough for a PCI-E SSD to make a noticeable difference.

[Natalia]

Yeah, when I am doing games, it's almost always at 4k, and usually sitting above 40FPS -- was just wanting that to be over 60 more often.

As far as your SSD comment, yeah I have been curious about having one of those M.2 SSDs, but I probably can wait till next year when the 10nm 6-core CPUs are finally being released.

[StyM]

i went from 5820k to 2686v3 , 6 cores - > 18 cores.
compiling projects on visual studio is easy peasy, i used to work on a project with 800 sub projects to compile, with 36 threads, it went from 3 hrs+ to 1hr+ compile time.

[Natalia]

i went from 5820k to 2686v3 , 6 cores - > 18 cores.
compiling projects on visual studio is easy peasy, i used to work on a project with 800 sub projects to compile, with 36 threads, it went from 3 hrs+ to 1hr+ compile time.

Really -- Even at the much slower speed of the 2686v3?
What did you have it clocked to?

[StyM]

running @ 2.3ghz on all cores.