I’ve been saving money for a while and I am now ready to upgrade my videocard. I currently have a evga gtx 970 and I’m looking at upgrading to a 2080. I have been reading various articles, forums, reddit, and watching youtube videos and it seems the consensus is if you’re upgrading from the 900 serious and older it’s worth the upgrade. I realize we all have a different value with the word “worth” so I understand worth can be very subjective.
I see that 1080s and 1080 ti’s have dropped considerably but the 1080 ti is pretty similar priced to the 2080 which is why for me the 2080 makes the most sense. The 2080 ti is bit too much money than I’m willing to spend and while the 2080 is getting up there I can swing the 2080. The other reason why I’m thinking of going with a 2080 is largely because when I bought my 970 the 1000 series cards came out not that much later and then by the time I wanted to upgrade the cyrpto mining hit and prices sky rocketed. So I had to skip the 1000 series generation.
I’ve been using evga cards for the last couple of generations and have been very pleased with their products and considering going with an evga 2080. I am more or less asking for people to chime in with their thoughts based on the thoughts and conclusions I have come to. If you had a 970 and could comfortably afford a 2080 would you? or would you go another route? what 2080 brand would you go with? Any and all thoughts welcome.
970 to anything 1070 or higher will be a big jump.
personally, i don’t want to support nvidia but even a 1070 will be a significant (guessing ~1.5-2x) upgrade.
which card to buy depends on your budget…
that said… what monitor are you running, and do you plan to upgrade it?
if i wasn’t running 4k, i would not bother with higher than a 1070-1080 at the moment.
so 1080/2070… yes.
2080 and up is a harder sell unless you’re pushing 4k.
if you aren’t running 4k, lower cards will be more than adequate. put the extra money into beer, hookers, girlfriend presents, or whatever for the time being. at least until either RTX takes off, you get a 4k display, or games start pushing for more horsepower at whatever res you do run at.
buy higher end at THAT point, not now. Prices will only get cheaper from here.
I would also recomment the 2070 instead. Like Jayz2cent have made a video on it, you can get the EVGA RTX 2070 Black Edition for 500$ and have better performance than a 1080, which is reasonable compared to the inflated price of the 2080.
Thing is, a lot of games have horribly broken multi-gpu support, and dual 1080 TI (shit, even single 1080ti) is total overkill unless you’re running 4k and the game supports SLI properly. Fuck dual 1080TIs when you could get a 2080Ti (or even a single 2080, which will be MUCH better than 1080ti SLI 95% of the time). Not worth the hassle, at all.
With the OP currently running a 970, i’m guessing he’s not driving 4k with it right now.
edit: i say this as a recent vega 64 crossfire user. it was a neat experiment, but i’ve pulled the second card out to put into a pc for the GF to use and reclaimed my RX480 back off her to make VFIO easier. Even the RX480 is fine for current games at 1080p60.
RTX2070 or RTX2080 would be a really decent upgrade imo.
I personally wouldnt bother with the previous GTX1070ti / GTX1080Ti cards anymore,
since Nvidia generally drops support for previous gen cards pretty quickly after new gen comes out.
They barely bother into optimizing performance for previous gen cards.
So i would advice to keep that in mind.
If you should go with either a RTX2070 or RTX2080 highly depends on the rest of your system specs,
and of course the games you mainly play and how you play them.
So if you could provide us some more system spec’s like cpu, monitor and resolutions you aim to game at.
That would be easier for us to recommend something that will be balanced and good value for money.
Because yeah you could of course allways buy the highest end video card,
but if you dont have the cpu that could keep up with it at a certain resolution or workload.
Then that would also kinda be a waste of money.
EVGA cards are generally very decent, so i dont really have anything to add negative against them.
On Nvidia side of things EVGA and Asus cards are generally my favorite brands.
But thats mainly because i personally also take a closer look to pcb’s of the card,
and how the vrm’s are build up.
The performance difference between 1080Ti and 2080 is not really that much…
970 is basically 1060 levels of performance, and not the good 1060 with 6 gigs of ram - the bad cut down version with 3 gigs of ram, so yes… 1080Ti/2080 will basically double or even more than double your performance.
I will say this. If you can find used 1080Ti for a decent price - grab it and be happy. RayTracing is not worth it…
I have two Asus 1080p 1ms monitors and a Ryzen 1700
People are correct that I’m not running 4k atm. I want to get one but I have no major issue. At the price of what 2k and 4k monitors are it would be hard to get two. If I were to let’s say buy one and then add it to my setup I’d have one monitor that is different model and possibly brand which would mean the colors would be off slightly. I’ve done this before and it drives me nuts.
So my answer would be yes I do plan on 4k but not right out of the gate. So it sounds like maybe for a guy like myslef in my situation I’d be better suited to wait for the third party seller 2070s
Well yeah if have plans to upgrade your monitor setup to something like a 4K monitor.
Then a RTX2080 would be a decent choice there.
However it depends on which time frame you do have planned an monitor upgrade.
Because if you game at 1080p at the moment with a Ryzen 1700, a RTX2080 you might not get the full potential out of that particular card with a Ryzen 1700 cpu at 1080p gaming.
Atleast not in every game arround the board.
So in that regards for 1080p gaming a RTX2070 would probablly more balanced for your cpu.
But of course wenn you have plans to upgrade to a 4K monitor anytime soon.
Then its a whole different story, because then you will be gpu bound in most gaming scenario’s anyways even with a RTX2080 (Ti)
So in that scenario a Ryzen 1700 should be totally fine.
they don’t gimp older cards steve from hardware unboxed " THE BENCHMARK GOD" tested some games with old and new drivers it’s a fairy tale that older cards get gimped with drivers
YT video he made -> Hardware Unboxed
My upgrade path was from a 660 to a 970 to a 980ti to a 1080ti. I buy used on eBay and have never had an issue. I picked up a used 1080ti for a good price, and based on benchmarks it pretty much matches 2080.
Strictly speaking, the 2080 isn’t really worth the ~$100 premium over a 1080ti, but in a month or so you won’t be able to buy a 1080ti new anymore, so that won’t matter. Depends on your price-sensitivity, if I were upgrading I’d buy the 2080.
I agree that the 2070 is probably your best bet. Again it isn’t really worth the premium over a 1080, but DLSS may turn out to have some value in the end. I’m dubious that anything less than the 2080ti will ultimately turn out to be worthwhile for ray-tracing, even at 1080p.
If your looking to upgrade to 4k this may be a good option.
I can’t speak from a ton of experience with this brand but I picked up one of these about a year ago and I’ve had zero issues with it. I will say the built-in speakers are pretty garbage but I have a nice pair of Audio-Technica Headphones so it’s not an issue for me. I don’t know your budget but you may be able to grab two of these for the price they’re at. There are a fair few reviews talking about dead pixels and such so buy at your own risk but I haven’t had any issues with this display.
haha and I have some flying 