Upgrade Graphics Card, worth it?

[Jason_Peters 16]

I built my current rig in late 2011, and it has held up surprisingly well.  However, as I've moved up into P3Dv4.4 and soon 4.5, it's really been showing some occasional struggles.  Most recently I've really struggled with frame rates at FlyTampa's KLAS, and PacSim's KSLC sceneries which I know are tough on frames in general. The majority of my flying is in PMDG or FSLabs aircraft, with occasional GA.

I'm wondering if upgrading the graphics card will net me some increase in performance, and perhaps get me another year or two out of this system?  It's currently running with an NVIDIA GTX 960.  Obviously it's probably time to re-build, but I don't really have the budget for another complete build right now.

Thoughts? Recommendations on cards?

 

Current Specs:

i7-2600K (stable overclock to 4.4 since built)

ASUS P8Z68 Deluxe Gen3

Corsair H100 Liquid Cooler

8GB of DDR3 RAM

NVIDIA GTX 960

Dell U3415W Ultra Widescreen Monitor - 3440x1440

 

Edited May 22, 2019 by Jason_Peters
Forgot Monitor Specs

[Bob Scott 7,716]

If you can find a nice used 980Ti, that'd be an improvement that P3Dv4 could take advantage of without overmatching the rest of the system.

I have that same mobo with the same CPU in it sitting on my desk right now...pondering what to do with it.  I might turn it into a Linux box for some ham radio stuff.

Regards

[Jason_Peters 16]

3 hours ago, w6kd said:

If you can find a nice used 980Ti, that'd be an improvement that P3Dv4 could take advantage of without overmatching the rest of the system.

I have that same mobo with the same CPU in it sitting on my desk right now...pondering what to do with it.  I might turn it into a Linux box for some ham radio stuff.

Regards

Thanks for the input Bob. Any particular model of the 980ti? I'm browsing around Amazon, and new is probably more than I want to spend. But there is a decent amount of them floating around used on eBay to consider.

What about a 1070Ti?

I'm also considering adding another 8GB of RAM too, DDR3 1600 has become cheaper than I remember. Be nice to give this system another year or more!

Edited May 22, 2019 by Jason_Peters

[Bob Scott 7,716]

3 hours ago, Jason_Peters said:

Thanks for the input Bob. Any particular model of the 980ti? 

I'm browsing around Amazon, and new is probably more than I want to spend. But there is a decent amount of them floating around used on eBay to consider. Be nice to give this system another year or more!

I'm considering adding another 8GB of RAM too, DDR3 1600 has become cheaper than I remember. 

No, any of them should do much better than that 960.  I used to use a pair of water-cooled eVGA 980Ti HydroCopper GPUs in SLI and they rocked.

If you go from 8 to 16, buy a new 16GB kit...mixing and matching RAM is just butt pain looking for a butt...  😉

Cheers

[Jason_Peters 16]

1 minute ago, w6kd said:

No, any of them should do much better than that 960.  I used to use a pair of water-cooled eVGA 980Ti HydroCopper GPUs in SLI and they rocked.

If you go from 8 to 16, buy a new 16GB kit...mixing and matching RAM is just butt pain looking for a butt...  😉

Cheers

What about the 1070Ti?

As far as the RAM I was just going to buy another 8GB kit, same part as the last time... would that not work?

[Bob Scott 7,716]

Just now, Jason_Peters said:

What about the 1070Ti?

As far as the RAM I was just going to buy another 8GB kit, same part as the last time... would that not work?

1070Ti would be good also...approximately the same performance as the 980Ti while drawing less power.

If you've had that memory for years, I doubt that the same part is available, or if it is, that it uses the same DRAM chips as the originals.  It *might* work, but be prepared to have to fiddle with timings to get them to work together.  If you know what you're doing, you can usually get them to work together, but possibly at the expense of reduced bandwidth.  From my perspective, life's too short to spend three days trying to get two unmatched pairs of DIMMs to play nice.

Regards

[jmdriskell 178]

I dropped an ASUS EX-GTX1060-6OC into my wheezy Dell XPS 8500 and replacing the original AMD Radeon 7540 (?) and the new card made all the difference in the operation.  Cost about $200 and it was really worth it.  Only problem is that some of the action spots in Firefox are washed out and I have to hunt for them.

Just a thought,

Jim Driskell

[Jason_Peters 16]

I decided to order a gently used EVGA GTX 1070 Ti (08G-P4-6775-KR) off of eBay.. fingers crossed!

[Jude Bradley 659]

I only saw you post now, so a bit late, but a good guide for seeing how much improvement you get from upgrading cards is

https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/

Most if not all Flightsim software is CPU bound rather than GPU.