Trying to decide between RTX 30 series cards for new build next month

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RareAir23

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Hi all. So on Labor Day weekend (in less than 3 weeks) I'm going from this old Intel system below:

Intel Core i7 6700K CPU
Gigabyte Z170X-Gaming 7 Z170 chipset motherboard
32GB G.Skill Trident-Z DDR4-3200 CL15 RAM
eVGA GeForce 1080 SC 8GB video card
Corsair AX850 850W 80-Plus Gold PSU

To this AMD system (FYI I already bought the parts [CPU, motherboard and memory]):

AMD Ryzen 7 3700X CPU
ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Hero X570 chipset motherboard
32GB G.Skill Trident-Z NEO DDR4-3600 CL16 RAM
eVGA or MSI GeForce RTX 30 series video card
Corsair AX850 850W 80-Plus Gold PSU

On the 2nd listing I said a GeForce RTX 30 series because I am uncertain which model to get next month. I'm thinking as low as a RTX 3070 or as high as an RTX 3080. I plan on playing games at 1440p Ultra setting with AA maxed out. There are a series of games I plan on playing (as examples):

DOOM 2016
DOOM: Eternal
Anthem
Tom Clancy's The Division 2
Cyberpunk 2077
Elite: Dangerous
Titanfall 2
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
Shadow Warrior 2
Quake: Champions
Guild Wars 2

So based on the information provided, where should I go with the RTX 30 series? A 3070? A 3080? Maybe a 3060? I know we know so little about these cards at the moment but based on what we'll discover (so you can certainly answer this when we know more) and what we know so far where could be the best direction to go? Thanks in advance for your answers and advice and until next time I am out!
 
GA100 fully unlocked, of course.

Reality is, Nvidia did set the date of an announcement (not specifically stated to be about their next GPUs, but definitely interpreted and assumed to be) for Sept 1st.

It's a hair over two weeks away. Best to wait until then (whether it's direct information or speculation, chances are you'll still better off waiting until after that announcement, rather than waiting for WAGs beforehand).
 
What those folks said.

I expect a soft-launch, so Jensen will talk about amazing things you want (or not) Sep 1, and you'll have some time beyond that to decide before anything is actually available.

I'd suggest not worrying / thinking excessively about it until then, because all we have now are wildly varying rumors.
 
rtx 3000 series hasnt even been officially announced and you expect to have one in hand in two weeks?!
youre better off waiting until black friday now.
 
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pendragon1 exactly, i would not expect these GPU's and likely to ONLY be the very high end released "maybe" in September, MAYBE..but more likely later towards end of year for actual stock to be everywhere.
 
A 3070 should ~ 2080 Ti and ought to be enough if you are just gaming at 1440p or below. A 3080 or higher should probably be the minimum for 4K, especially if you plan on getting a 120hz display.
 
Kinda need to know the resolution and refresh rate that it needs to drive to know for sure but with the preliminary information/rumors so far and just taking an conservative educated guess based on the games listed a RTX3070 or RTX3070ti(if it exists) would be fine.
 
My take is depends how long between upgrades. My base system is a 4790k which initially had a 970gtx. I got a used 1080i last year. That makes the system around 6 years old. If you go long between upgrades, I suggest best you can afford or are willing to pay for.

My current system will be handed down to my kids when I build myself a new Ryzen Zen3 system hopefully later in the year or early next year. The GPU to be determined but cant see myself justifying going over $800 for it even if i can afford more.
 
Here's what I will respond with based on what I've received so far. As to wanting to max things out? Remember where I would be maxing out from: 1440p. That's the resolution where with the RTX 20 series you could max that resolution with at minimum a 2070 Super (so long as your CPU/memory didn't bottleneck the video card). 2080 Super or 2080Ti would be maxing out 1440p too and leaving some in the tank for more as both 2080 Super and Ti are this last generation's 4K cards for better or worse. Reason I left myself out of the RTX 20 series by the way was because I wasn't thrilled with nVIDIA placing ray tracing hardware on the cards before the Super series (its new key feature) that cut performance by a large margin with the feature enabled and then charge $100-$150 more per card compared to the GTX 10 series. I think they're trying to create an Apple-like "nVIDIA Premium" on their products for themselves and I don't totally agree with them doing that because of the ray tracing feature cutting framerates by a large margin when enabled on the non Super cards (sans the 2080Ti) and expecting people to pay more for that.

As to the parts I selected (the motherboard being $100 more than the CPU) I was originally going to work with an MSI MPG X570 Gaming Plus motherboard. Returned it for a refund after discovering through knowledgeable tech sources that the Power VRM configuration for that board was rather lousy. So I went with the ROG Crosshair VIII Hero as that has a bit more than the MPG X570 Gaming Plus in its feature set but also has a better Power VRM configuration. Plus my refunded money from the MSI board paid for half the price of the Crosshair VIII Hero. Some of you did provide some idea as to what to get. Thanks for that. Also, as to when I last upgraded my video card (which is my current eVGA GTX 1080 SC)? According to my order history on Amazon it was November 2016. As for having to wait until Black Friday to get any card from the new line at all? We'll see. I think on September 1st after nVIDIA's presentation we'll certainly know that score then. Also, 1 last thing: I am running a Gigabyte AORUS FI27Q-P 27" monitor with a 165Hz refresh rate and 1ms response time. Thanks and until next time I am out!
 
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RareAir23 said:
That's the resolution where with the RTX 20 series you could max that resolution with at minimum a 2070 Super (so long as your CPU/memory didn't bottleneck the video card). 2080 Super or 2080Ti would be maxing out 1440p too and leaving some in the tank for more as both 2080 Super and Ti are this last generation's 4K cards for better or worse.
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While these generalizations of performance to output resolution are more or less useful, I'd steer clear of using them directly or without caveats.

The caveats being your targets for specific games as well as framerates and frametimes.
RareAir23 said:
Reason I left myself out of the RTX 20 series by the way was because I wasn't thrilled with nVIDIA placing ray tracing hardware on the cards before the Super series (its new key feature) that cut performance by a large margin with the feature enabled and then charge $100-$150 more per card compared to the GTX 10 series.
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I did the same thing, but I have a 1080Ti. Performance at 1440p on a high-refresh rate screen is more than acceptable for me, and I don't see too much benefit to ray tracing today.

That said, if I didn't have a 1080Ti, I'd have a card with ray tracing. There are no alternatives today, and there won't be in the future, and while it won't be a cornerstone of every upcoming game (thanks AMD), it'll still be a high-profile feature that will likely hit a broad swath of genres throughout the life of the Ampere generation, and whatever AMD releases after Big Navi that may have acceptable RT performance.
RareAir23 said:
I think they're trying to create an Apple-like "nVIDIA Premium" on their products for themselves and I don't totally agree with them doing that because of the ray tracing feature cutting framerates by a large margin when enabled on the non Super cards (sans the 2080Ti) and expecting people to pay more for that.
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Ray tracing or not, Nvidia arguably has a feature lead that makes their GPUs worth the premium they ask. This isn't dissimiler to Apple.
 
I would wait for benches if in doubt...you know...real data, not just people's fuzzy warm feelings.
 
I am not sure why people seem to expect that these questions can be answered before the media embargo lifts on these products. None of them have been reviewed and while some of the rumors about these cards may be true, we don't know a lot about what's true and what isn't. We simply have no idea how these new cards will perform. How can we recommend anything?
 
Dan_D said:
I am not sure why people seem to expect that these questions can be answered before the media embargo lifts on these products. None of them have been reviewed and while some of the rumors about these cards may be true, we don't know a lot about what's true and what isn't. We simply have no idea how these new cards will perform. How can we recommend anything?
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It is "Silly Season" the quality of posts drop by 500% during the "Season"...
 
Wait for reviews and spend what will make you happy based on your own budget. So much of what we assumed about Turing and Navi launches turned out to be wrong.
 
You sure that CPU is a significant upgrade for your total system update at this point?

i7 6700 to Ryzen 3700?

I just was benchmarking tonight thinking about updating and determining Ryzen 3700x is not a significant enough upgrade for me...and your 6700 chip can probably overclock just as high or higher than my 6950x chip (I’m at 4.2Ghz). So until you actually need 8 cores for game engines — maybe hold off for next gen Ryzen refresh???
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Are there any rumors that 3070 and/or 3080 actually make real world use of PCI-E gen 4? If not maybe you keep your current platform and just update your GPU to the 3080 or 3080ti with the money you saved. Return the parts you bought??? Upgrade your platform when there is a larger performance difference!
 
After reading Archaea's comments, within about 30 minutes of the read I caught a video on Gamers Nexus' YouTube channel that was posted there last Christmas Eve talking about how worthwhile an upgrade to Ryzen 3000 is if you have a Core i7 6700K or a Core i5 6600K. Those who wish to see the video, there's a link here:



It was a quite well put-together video. I've always run my i7 6700K at stock. Sure I could OC it but to this point I haven't yet found a need to and I usually try to stay away from OCing parts myself. It's something I have 0 experience in and to this point I haven't found a need for it. Fortunately Gamers Nexus' benches in their video featured the i7 6700K at stock and OCed. Of what I found, AMD Ryzen 7 3700X beat the Core i7 6700K 8-3 in the gaming benchmarks and swept the i7-6700K in productivity benches. Now some of the gaming benches AMD won in this video weren't by much percentage-wise but as Coach Jimmy McGinty said in the football movie The Replacements, "A win is a win." Answering to the argument, "But the i7 6700K has at least 2-4 good years left in it right now: stock clock or OC." My response to that is how can one be so sure? PS5 and XBox Series X have good potential starting this Fall to push gaming by graphical fidelity a great deal in that 2-4 year time period. A lot of titles will be coming out that will push the envelope. Cyberpunk 2077 is likely to push hardware whether it's on a PC or console incredibly hard. Horizon: Zero Dawn on PC looks to be a resource intensive game for today's hardware let alone the i7-6700K (per Tom's Hardware benchmarks on the game). Anthem (for all the bad coding, compiling and optimization that has) is heavy on resource use*. There will be more down the developer's pipeline that is going to push everything to a great degree, only question is how quickly will it get here? Now going away from this video there are reasons I am going to my new build over my old build. Here they are:

Reason 1: X570 will be compatible with Zen 3. This is good in my mind because while I'll be starting my journey with AMD with Zen 2 I know down the road anytime I want to drop in a new Zen 3 CPU to my Crosshair VIII Hero the option is there which to me gives me an clear upgrade path to walk to when the time comes (BIOS update willing). I can't say the same for Skylake/Z170. All I can do with that is overclock the CPU and hope for the best.

Reason 2: PCI Express 4.0 is available on X570. Intel's platforms still lack it. This was another big reason to make the jump. While only some M.2 nVME SSDs can use PCIe 4.0 for storage speed and very few other hardware pieces take advantage of it now where will we be after September 1st and nVIDIA's event is over? The new GeForce RTX 30 series of video cards may use it. AMD's upcoming Big Navi video cards will very likely use it. To both we don't know right at this moment. But if both turn out to do so, guess which platform will likely run either brand's cards faster? Logic suggests running a PCIe 4.0 video card in a PCIe 3.0 capable x16 slot will only slow it down by even a few FPS. Running a PCIe 4.0 video card in a PCIe 4.0 x16 slot will get the most out of it.

Reason 3: It's been more than a year since X570/Zen 2's launch. Product is more mature now. If this was August of 2019 I would've flinched in making this move in September of 2019. We're in August 2020 now. The product of Zen 2 and X570 is more stable and matured now than it was a year ago. While there's always room for improvement in that department I feel I can make the step-up now and feel good about what I'm doing.

Now am I going to miss my i7-6700K? A great degree yes. It's been a great CPU and has served me well. I was especially fortunate to get a motherboard from Gigabyte at the time with an authentic Creative Sound Blaster Recon3D audio chip as the integrated audio chip (Gigabyte G1 GA-Z170X-Gaming 7 motherboard. Gigabyte's G1 series at Z170 was the only modern motherboard series to use Creative audio chips as their integrated motherboard audio package. I looked it up). But I think I can prepare myself better for the future by making the jump now. I know some won't agree with my call and I understand but it's what I want to do. Also, the "*" in the post equals no one is truly certain how resource intensive Anthem is at this time. The only benchmarks I found for the game were for the demo released in February 2019. No one anywhere (and I looked hard) has posted benchmarks for Anthem: The Final Product. Adding to that, the demo benchmarks I did find told me this game taxed well...both the CPU and GPU pretty good. It packed quite a wallop to both. So that's what I got and until next time I am out!
 
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RareAir23 said:
Fortunately Gamers Nexus' benches in their video featured the i7 6700K at stock and OCed. Of what I found, AMD Ryzen 7 3700X beat the Core i7 6700K 8-3 in the gaming benchmarks and swept the i7-6700K in productivity benches. Now some of the gaming benches AMD won in this video weren't by much percentage-wise but as Coach Jimmy McGinty said in the football movie The Replacements, "A win is a win."
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A win is a win but many of those are by a few fps at 1080p. Not worth a whole platform upgrade. How many of those productivity apps do you use? While it's great for people who do use them the amount of hype among gamers and reviewers for Ryzen productivity performance is misleading. The vast majority of gamers don't use those apps.

If gaming is your priority a 10600k is a better option today than the 3700x. That may change with Zen 3 so I agree with the folks who advise you to wait a few months before deciding on a platform but it's probably too late :)
 
Are you asking this question because you’re not sure how they’ll perform due to them not being released and no reviews benchmarks are available, much less pricing? Because we’re all in that same boat.
 
Nice game list by the way ;) Buy 3090/3090Ti if your wallet can afford hehe:)
 
Well, now that so many of us have seen the video presentation today (including me) I would think to game at 1440p Ultra settings to every game on my list mentioned in an earlier post here my tech mind is thinking 3070 right at the moment. But I digress and ask does the 3070 sound right for 1440p Ultra sound right to all of you based on what we know now? Or should I spring for a 3080? Thanks in advance for advice and answers and until next time I am out!
 
RareAir23 said:
Well, now that so many of us have seen the video presentation today (including me) I would think to game at 1440p Ultra settings to every game on my list mentioned in an earlier post here my tech mind is thinking 3070 right at the moment. But I digress and ask does the 3070 sound right for 1440p Ultra sound right to all of you based on what we know now? Or should I spring for a 3080? Thanks in advance for advice and answers and until next time I am out!
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If you can afford the 3080, no real reason to go lower?
 
I’m a 1440p Gamer, 3080 for all intents and purposes is the logical choice. However, I just can’t shake the disappointment I’ll have knowing I went from 11gb to 10gb vram so 3090 it is!
 
RamonGTP said:
I’m a 1440p Gamer, 3080 for all intents and purposes is the logical choice. However, I just can’t shake the disappointment I’ll have knowing I went from 11gb to 10gb vram so 3090 it is!
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From 11 gb of slower VRAM to 10 gb of extremely quick VRAM able to purge and refresh much faster. I wouldn't get too caught up in that. The more efficient memory will overcome the deficit of 1 gb.
 
Saabjock said:
From 11 gb of slower VRAM to 10 gb of extremely quick VRAM able to purge and refresh much faster. I wouldn't get too caught up in that. The more efficient memory will overcome the deficit of 1 gb.
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Like I said, the logical choice is the 3080, I just don’t like going from 11 to 10
 
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