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I have an older PC that runs our plex, that was still on Windows 7 (was at our house up north, not on the Internet, so no big deal). However, we are spending more time up there, and slow cell Internet is . . . blah. So we are going to upgrade to fiber up there (Fiber made it to our house in the woods sooner than our main house in the suburbs) and will be streaming. So the PC is going to be connected again, and I don't want it on Windows 7 any more. I upgraded to Windows 10, and boy is it slow now. I did discover it's able to run Windows 11, but I'm afraid of what they will do to it. So I've been shopping parts.

Microcenter has the 7600x3d on sale right now, and there are motherboard bundles. I'm noticing $100 difference between boards that support PCIe 5.0 vs 4.0. Do I need 5.0? Not right now, with my old, trusty, and plenty capable 1080ti that runs everything I do great. However, when I DO want to upgrade. . . .

That's my roadblock right now. Even though I don't feel like dropping a bunch of money on a new GPU, I eventually will. Do I spend the $100 now to support 5.0? Much of what I'm reading says that a 5.0 card in a 4.0 slot see negligible degradation in performance. It's not until you exceed the GPU's built in memory that the bus slows things down noticeably. Will I ever play a game that uses that much memory? When will that game come? What will my next GPU be? If I was to buy one now, which one would it be? I'm looking at benchmarks and stuff and it seems like the jumps in performance aren't very big. I'm seeing past generation cards outperforming new cards. Why? What do the new cards do that the old can't? What the fuck is going on?

Share your GPU knowledge.

This is not my beautiful house

Wish I could help you, but it's been over a decade since I've built my own PC and 4 years since I've bought one with any focus on the GPU.

Same. havent built anything in a while. and bought a prebuilt pc

I built my current PC in 2021, got everything but the GPU and still running the 1080 that Leisher gave me almost 10 years ago. I did get the PCIe 5.0 for future expansion, but if i'll ever need it, who knows.

The 1080 and especially the 1080Ti are considered great value long lasting cards that many people are still using. I'd say i probably play more AAA game titles than you do and i can still get good frames usually on medium to low settings on a 2K monitor. I'm not in the market to get a new card right now and hoping i get another 3+ years out of it. So as long as yours keeps running, id play it till it dies.

You are correct that the new gen cards dont really surpass older cards by all that much. But if i were to get one today i'd probably go with the 3080Ti for around $400 or if you're ok with AMD cards a 6700XT 12GB for around $250. that one might not outperform your 1080Ti by too much though.

Things I'm wondering about the new GPU benchmarks.

The 1080ti gets around 8k for a score. A new $$350 card gets 10k for a score, and a new $700 gets like 12k or something. That being said, the 1080 doesn't do ray tracing. Is that why the $350 card only has 10k? Because it's doing ray tracing? Is the $700 card only at 12k because it's doing ray tracing at 4k, where the other cards are at 2k or 1080p? The review sites just aren't as good as they used to be where they would show frame rates at a bunch of different settings, in a bunch of different games, and you can see where they fall short, where they jump ahead, etc. Now, you just get some arbitrary 'score' and they don't go into what 'is' that score.

Same with the CPU. If you look at benchmark scores, the Core 7 ultra blows the AMD chips out of the water. By a lot. In both single and multi thread tests. But if you read about which one you should get, everyone says "AMD". And that's about the depth of their recommendation. No details. No supporting evidence. Just "Get the AMD. It's better.". But it's got 12k fewer points for a score and it's $45 more than the Ultra. . .

Review sites are shit now. Just have to trust the fan boys?

Cakedaddy wrote: ↑Tue Oct 28, 2025 2:42 pm Just have to trust the fan boys?

r/pcmasterrace