Hello,
I’m thinking of upgrading my GPU, I know the configuration is dated, but I’d like to keep this PC for a little longer.
i7-4790K
KINGSTON 16GB 2133
ASUS Z97 MAXIMUS VII
GPU MSI R9 290OC
CORSAIR 750W
Which GPU would be best for playing games like Cyberpunk 2077 in 1080p?
The budget would be somewhere between 100€ and 200€, which can be used.
Thanks!
A 5600XT/5700/5700XT, probably. Though an RX 580 would probably be about as much GPU as I’d want to throw at that system today.
Basically anything that uses a full X16 configuration should be fine, so no RTX 3050, RX 5500 XT, RX 6600, RX 7600, but 4c4t will be a choke point in quite a few newish games.
I had basically the same setup. I am very familiar with Cyberpunk 2077 system requirements.
I suggest a used RTX 3060 12GB ~ $100 - 200€+
I have the 3060 Ti 8GB and would suggest that if in your budget
One issue I found with my setup is your motherboard Does Not support the newer M.2 PCIe SSD’s at full speed.
The motherboard M.2 ports are PCIe 2.0
I had to add a Add-In-Card that fits into a PCIe slot to get better PCIe 3.0 SSD performance.
I can’t use full PCIe 4.0 speeds. Not that I need that.
Please notice the excellent performance from my Primo Cache drive D:
The i7-4790K is 4core / 8 threads 4.4 Ghz. It’s still good enough for gaming at 1080p.
Wouldn’t the RX 6600 be recommended for the may system because it’s PCI 4?
Thanks for the reply!
With an RTX 3060, can I get a high 1080p preset with Cyberpunk 2077?
I notice that too about the M.2 slot. Do you have the same motherboard?
I thought it didn’t support add-in cards.
Thanks for the reply!
The trouble with the 6600, or 5500, or 4060, or 7600, is that they use PCIe 4.0 x8 and your system supports Gen 3.0. Gen 3 x16 is fine and not a restriction for the vast majority of GPUs, but Gen 3 x8 can be, and the x8 cards are forever x8, so they require a Gen 4 capable system to work properly.
A 5700XT, 6700, 3060, etc will all be fine, and they all have the GPU horsepower to do 1080P High in just about everything, though RT will be mostly best left off. However, you may find your CPU not really up to the task. I can vouch for the RX 6700 doing 1080 High very well, though I run 4K Medium + FSR Auto as it looks prettier on my screen.
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The M.2 add on card I got was cheap and works no problem. I sold my 1TB Samsung 990 PCIe-4 SSD and got a 4TB PCIe-3 Silicon Power UD90 SSD.
I couldn’t use the speed of the Samsung so I went for cheap big storage SiliconPower instead.
I bought a 6650XT for a system pretty much specced like yours and I didn’t see any issue with performance. For the price I think it’s a pretty good value.
Has not been my case. We’re also talking about slotting it in a system with a 4C/8T CPU that’s 10 years old. So any performance left on the table is surely not gonna come from the PCIe connection but more so by the CPU and the overall performance of the platform.
Not true at all, the performance loss is in the single digits worst case running x8 lanes at PCIe 3.0 on most of those cards.
I even have an RX6400 with x4 lanes running in a Gen3 system just fine, performance loss is maybe up to 10% max in certain situations and negligible in others.
I’m looking at the following used cards, they range from 150 to 190€:
RX 6700 10GB
RX 6600 8GB
RX 5700 XT 8GB
If I go for the RX 6700, could I have serious performance problems with the PCIe 3.0 8x limitation?
Thank you all for your help!
It doesn’t matter because you will be CPU bottlenecked either way.
The RX6700 uses a PCIe x16 interface (at least according to TechPowerUp).
Like most people here have already said… That CPU is going to severely bottleneck whatever GPU you get. You could put a 4090 in there, but that would not push frames any faster than, say, a 4060 or 3060 would. In fact, I’d dare to suggest there is not much difference in the 3060 and the 3050 on that rig, compare these two:
There are only two cards that are cheaper than $200 at the moment that are really a deal, the AMD Radeon RX 6600 and the Intel Arc 750, both at ~$199.
If you want a budget card to throw in there that will last quite a long time, you need to up your game. I have heard good things about Intel finally getting their drivers together, so the Arc 770 at $279 is a really solid buy if you are willing to take a gamble, and the AMD Radeon 7600 XT is also not too shabby at $319. Both have 16GB VRAM which means they will last quite a long time, atleast 3 years, possibly longer.
As for system upgrades, you have three options to upgrade core that makes somewhat sense. I fully understand you do not wish to upgrade, but I am going to outline your options anyway because it is way past time. Feel free to ignore the below advice.
Cheapest core build available today. Not much else to say about it. The 8 core would be a solid boost over the 4790k, and a doubling of RAM is also nice. Still, this system will not last forever. For a cheap budget gaming system in 2024, it is pretty good. However, do not expect it to be exceptional on 1440p / 4k, if you plan to upgrade your monitor soon, I’d look at the other alternatives.
| Type | Item | Price |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | AMD Ryzen 7 5700X | $179.99 |
| CPU Cooler | ARCTIC Freezer 7 X CO | $26.99 |
| Motherboard | MSI B550M PRO-VDH WIFI | $99.00 |
| Memory | TEAMGROUP T-Create Expert 2x16 GB DDR4-3600 CL18 | $55.99 |
| Total | $361.97 |
If Intel is your jam, this core will rock your current systems’ socks and knock it thrice around the block. Great upgrade for the price, the only problem is the complete lack of a decent upgrade path. 
That said, this system can easily keep gaming until AM6 comes out. A great 1440p base.
| Type | Item | Price |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Core i5-14500 | $239.99 |
| CPU Cooler | ARCTIC Freezer 36 | $25.40 |
| Motherboard | MSI PRO Z690-A WIFI | $149.00 |
| Memory | TEAMGROUP T-Create Expert 2x16 GB DDR5-6400 CL32 | $95.99 |
| Total | $510.38 |
Main idea with this build is that you are upgrading your core now, only to slot in a bigger and more capable CPU later. Pay a little extra now for a really good and cheap system upgrade down the road, so to speak.
Biggest drawback with this build is that you will be spending a bit of your time on a sub-optimal build - but you will have a 50% performance boost with 2 extra cores, quite a bit better than what you have today. You could save $50 on the extra 16GB RAM I suppose, but why bother?
| Type | Item | Price |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | AMD Ryzen 5 7600 | $197.99 |
| Motherboard | Asus TUF GAMING X670E-PLUS WIFI | $279.99 |
| Memory | TEAMGROUP T-Create Expert 2x16 GB DDR5-6400 CL32 | $95.99 |
| Total | $573.97 |
Hope that helps, as always, these are just there to outline options, choice is ultimately yours and not pulling the trigger is just as valid of a choice. And yes, the above is also meant for people in a similar situation, even though it may not fit the bill for you specifically. 
… 4x gen3 is definitely not a good idea for any decent GPU. Even just pulling a framebuffer from a high resolution display for transcoding can effect performance in a 4x Gen3 card.
Benchmarks have also shown it to be severely limiting in the past, so it’s kind of a known quantity that it can severely affect gaming performance in some pretty big ways.
53% uplift here. RX5500 outperforming the RX6500 too in this one.
Not always going to be like that, but when it’s bad, it’s bad.
8x 3.0 is probably fine for anything a 4790k can be running, but 4x…? Yeah maybe not a good idea for a gaming upgrade. Might want to get an older Gen3 card to get potentially much better performance there, for less money.
6700 is a good idea, though, good value at that price range. I’m surprised if you can get one so cheap, but maybe I’m out of date.
5700XT… I’ve heard nothing but problems with that card long-term, so I wouldn’t recommend one used. Maybe it’s better now, but it seems Navi1 just had some major hardware issues that were hacked up and worked around in the bigger cards.
4790k should still be pretty viable for today, I think people underestimate that CPU. It’s only 4c8t, but do you really think your 6c12t is so much better? Haswell is about in line with Zen+ in performance, and 4790k clocks very high, so anyone using something like a 2600 is in for only up to 50% more frames than that, and 2600 is certainly fine for gaming if you aren’t expecting the moon. It’ll hold back a 6700, but the 6700 can be carried forward in a year from now to a faster CPU, or can push higher resolutions and more antialiasing in the meantime anyway.
It’s not like a 4c4t or 2c4t, where the game is constantly fighting with it’s self to get code executed. I wouldn’t put anything in the background, but if you just run the game solo, 4c8t should still provide some solid and smooth experience even in some pretty recent games, I’d say. Anything that could be ported to PS4 and get >15fps can probably hit close to 60 on a 4790k.
… Or, so says Ershin anyway.
Average FPS shows a only a 12% uplift at 1080p according to your source.
The RX6400 is also a single slot low-profile card that can’t run above 30W without direct airflow, so you’re not going to be playing AAA games on it either way. It basically runs all my monitors and handles Steam remote play from the 6650XT in the living room.
I only brought up the 6400 to make a point about PCIe bottleneck on average and my direct experience with one in such a configuration.
And the average is split between games showing no difference at all, and games with a massive performance hit. Not exactly “up to 10% max in certain situations”.
That 53% it’s self is average performance over that game’s benchmarked time.
I think it’s pretty valid to avoid 4x cards on a 3.0 system. Even 8x cards with lower vram could possibly become a problem depending on how videogame resource managements shift in the future, but I doubt it will ever be relevant.
Looking into it more, it looks like even 6600 can see a dip of around 10% in some cases, likely in games that can take advantage of more video memory. I suspect the 4GB on the 6500/6400 is the main contribution to these outliers, as most modern games really do like to have over 8GB just for video memory. Probably, future games could show a larger disparity here.
Not a real problem in this case I think, but it’s a valid criticism of the card’s design.
You would be correct. It is also very easy to simply avoid those outliers.
I disagree, especially for 1080p, which is what OP is using. Unoptimpized exceptions do not make the rule.
If it’s not a problem, then it is criticism simply for its own sake and therefore anecdotal to the actual conversation at hand.
OP wants to play Cyberpunk at 1080p, which a 6600 will do 60fps on high settings all day long even on PCIe3.0. I would even bet I could get a (mostly) solid 30fps on my 6400 with lower tuned settings and FSR.
However, that being said, I was the one to bring up the 6400 and x4 as an example. OP is not even considering this card so I don’t know why you keep focusing on it.
If you don’t put any other device in the secondary PCIe slot connected to the CPU you’re gonna run that GPU at full x16 and the major bottleneck will be the CPU. You could overclock it to 4.8GHz, if it can handle it, and get some more performance out of it.
I’d go for the 6700 too because you can hang on it even if you buy a new platform after a year or two. The other ones are not worth it in my opinion.
It’s not unoptimized. There’s just no way to make it perform well on a 4GB card running at only PCIE 1.1 16x speeds.
Looking at scaling, it doesn’t seem like higher resolution actually produces worse relative performance. Seems the other way around, which makes sense, since it’s probably materials being ferried over the bus, rather than the framebuffer. If this were being video captured over a network through a secondary encoder source, though, that story might change, but I don’t have any benchmarks of it.
Valid criticism of the card’s design extends beyond this topic. Also, people are right to mention it as a potential concern, even if it doesn’t make an immediate difference and may not in the future make a significant impact, because it may, in the future, make a significant impact. It’s valid to list known information in order to inform better decision making for potential known unknowns.
I “keep focusing in it” because that is the thread of this conversation, which started by your implication that a PCIE 4x card like the 6400 or 6500 would show “only up to 10% in some edge cases” performance degradation over it’s performance potential, which is misleading and could lead to poorly made decisions by someone asking for advice on a topic of which GPU is appropriate to look at, and continues by your continued replies to my replies which apparently require further clarification of the current topical progress in this subject.
I don’t know why you keep focusing on it, though. Seems pretty cut and dry to me.
Oh no, I accidentally said MAX when I meant AVERAGE in my first post, that completely invalidates everything I’ve said 
And the fact that you’re once again bringing up 4GB/x4 cards show that you are the one who can’t let it go as there isn’t even one on OPs shopping list.
Anyways, to stay on topic, if I were OP I would go with a 6700 if possible, if not any of the 8GB cards under $200 should be suitable even on an x8 bus.
Again, just replying to your replies to clarify things that aren’t clear. 
In case that wasn’t clear.
