Upgrade or new PC?

[burp]

Does anybody who still loiters on here actually know anything about current PC components? It's been many years since I last took any notice.

My PC is about 3 and a half years old now and the upgraded monitor is taking it's toll. I thought about upgrading the GPU early this year but the prices were insane. What I'm wondering is how the rest of the spec looks now, as while I've had a read bout GPUs and that there are new ones coming in a few months, so it makes sense to wait, is the rest of my system going to hold a new GPU back? That sentence was way too long. I have zero interest in building a new PC from scratch (seriously, I don't want to do it so don't tell me how easy it is, I've done it in the past, I'm just not interested). So yeah, upgrade or just buy a new PC?

Core i7-4790 CPU @  3.60GHZ

8 Gig of RAM

GTX 970

What I don't want is to upgrade the GPU and then find the CPU goes bad shortly after. How long do they last these days? Is that CPU still any good? And I assume 16G of RAM is the minimum these days?

 

[Nige]

Last time I looked at options - last year - it looked like cpu speed hadn't moved much, but GPU specs, and particularly, GPU memory requirements, had done so, considerably.

Faced with the same question as you, I upgraded my GPU for, iirc, £300 and it's done me very well for nearly 18 months.

Mind you, I play - when I get the chance - primarily Battlefield 1 on Ultra but at 1920 x 1080. Been caning ETS2 recently, and some Just Cause 2.  So not really heavy requirements, but I can't be arsed at the moment to do the research and buy a new PC.

To my mind if you upgrade your GPU and maybe add some memory, then even if your cpu goes tits up soon, you could re-use the GPU in a new system.

 

[paulod]

From my limited knowledge I'd agree with Nige.

Your cpu seems fine, could do with more memory but your graphics card is probably the weakest link, it's by no means bad but that's the obvious bit to upgrade for me.

Only thing is as your card was pretty high end when you bought it you're gonna have to spend a fair chunk to get a noticeable upgrade. Both Nige's card and mine (RX480 8gb) are only around 10% faster overall, you'd probably need a GTX1070 to see a significant jump and they retail around £400 at the minute.

My RX480 plays BF1 on Ultra @1080p no problem, if you're after 4k gaming you'll definitely need a GTX1070 minimum in my opinion.

 

[burp]

Thanks guys. I'm not quite at 4k gaming but my new monitor is 3440 x 1440 which is obviously a big step up from 1080P.

Think I'll just wait for the new cards to come out then, either get one of those or see if they knock the cost of the 1070/1080 down a bit. Add another 8G of RAM and hope everything else holds together for a while longer.