If I pick up the R9 290x or GTX 970 where would my next bottleneck be?

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Reikonyx

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Mar 16, 2015
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I need to start upgrading my pc to bring it back into gaming status. Looking for something to play The Witcher 3 and Star Citizen. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Here are my current specs:

Motherboard: Intel® Desktop Board DX58SO
Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-920 Processor
Ram: OCZ Platinum 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600
Power Supply: PC Power and Cooling S61EPS 610W Continuous
Graphics Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 570 1280 MB GDDR5
HDD: SanDisk Extreme SSD 240 GB
 
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coozie7
Like that Anandtech comparison! The i5 2500K doesn't get a clear victory in every bench, in fact in some it's pretty heavily trounced by the older part, imagine how the '920 would score if it was overclocked!

Back to the point at hand.
Yep, the GTX970 is a good, solid card but if your case can support a 12" long graphics card also consider one of the three fan cooled R9 290s, they're a little slower but quite a bit cheaper.

No prizes for the next upgrade suggestion: If you're not going to overclock the i5 4460 along with a 'H' series motherboard and 8Gb of fairly fast (DDR3 1600 minimum, faster if your pockets are deep enough) will see you right, if you're going to overclock a i5 4690K, a nice Z97 mobo and the same RAM will fit the...
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coozie7

coozie7

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Jun 2, 2007
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Like that Anandtech comparison! The i5 2500K doesn't get a clear victory in every bench, in fact in some it's pretty heavily trounced by the older part, imagine how the '920 would score if it was overclocked!

Back to the point at hand.
Yep, the GTX970 is a good, solid card but if your case can support a 12" long graphics card also consider one of the three fan cooled R9 290s, they're a little slower but quite a bit cheaper.

No prizes for the next upgrade suggestion: If you're not going to overclock the i5 4460 along with a 'H' series motherboard and 8Gb of fairly fast (DDR3 1600 minimum, faster if your pockets are deep enough) will see you right, if you're going to overclock a i5 4690K, a nice Z97 mobo and the same RAM will fit the bill, but add a reasonable CPU cooler into the upgrade during build time, the little Coolermaster Hyper 212 Evo is a popular choice for those who don't want to push too hard or just (like me) find the stock cooler a little too annoying under sustained load.

Now the Witcher may be strict on its requirements, and flat refuse to install on<banter>your ancient relic of a system but then again it might and you've only about 2 months to grab a fairly expensive upgrade (CPU/MB/RAM) so I'll suggest that you get the GTX970-whatever happens you'll need that-then just hold off and see what happens.
If the game loads and plays reasonably you can either delay the bigger upgrade until it's more convenient, try your hand at overclocking the existing i7 (you'd be surprised how well that can work-ask my semi retired i5 750) ;) or play an even longer game and wait until Intel announce their new hardware later this year.
 
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Narcissistic_Martyr

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Aug 15, 2013
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Low RAM is going to be your next problem as more and more games are taking up 6+ GB of RAM. A 12GB Trichannel kit will run you $100-150.

CPU will be fine for now but it might not be a bad idea to upgrade MB/CPU when broadwell/skylake come out depending on what DX12 does.
 
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