Upgrade Now or Later?

Hey everyone, I’ve been mulling over a potential upgrade for a few days now, though I’m honestly stuck in that classic dilemma: is this actually necessary, or am I just chasing ghosts? I can't quite decide if I should pull the trigger now or just sit tight and see how much longer I can squeeze blood from this stone 🤔

Specs:
LGA 1155 socket, i5 3570K overclocked to 4GHz
Corsair H80 High Performance Liquid Cooler
Corsair RAM 4x4GB, DDR3, 1600MHz
LGA 1155 socket, MSI Z77A-G45 gaming
SLI (2x) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 Gigabyte Samsung SSD 850
Samsung SSD 850 Evo 500GB
Corsair hx850i
1TB HDD
500GB HDD
NZXT Phantom 410

My current thought process involves swapping out the processor, motherboard, and RAM altogether.
Specifically, looking at an i5 6600K or maybe an i7 6700K, paired with a Z170 board and 16GB of DDR4.

A buddy of mine suggested that instead of tinkering with internals, I should just invest in a better display. Right now, I'm running a Samsung SyncMaster P2770HD.

So, that's the situation. I'd love to hear your thoughts on which direction makes the most sense. Thanks 🍿

Honestly, I’d probably leave everything else just the way it is—except for the graphics card. If you're looking at options, going with a GTX 1070 is definitely the way to go. 😁

Larry Ortiz5 said:Honestly, I’d probably leave everything else just the way it is—except for the graphics card. If you're looking at options, going with a GTX 1070 is definitely the way to go. 😁

I find this whole argument incredibly hard to swallow, primarily because the GTX 970 actually outperforms the 1060 in almost every measurable metric.

Ryan Gonzalez4 said:I find this whole argument incredibly hard to swallow, primarily because the GTX 970 actually outperforms the 1060 in almost every measurable metric.

Well, if you already know the answer, why ask for advice? I’m running a GTX 970 myself—not saying it's a bad card by any means—but looking at your setup, it's clearly built for gaming. You'd get a much more noticeable boost if you just jumped straight to a GTX 1070, which is way more powerful than what we're looking at here. And honestly, SLI isn't quite what people think it is; you end up dealing with higher power draw and stability issues in certain games (sometimes you even see lower FPS than expected). Personally, I'm always going to vote for one strong graphics card over two weaker ones paired up in SLI or AMD's Crossfire..

Honestly, if you're going to do anything, just grab a GTX 1070 and a 1440p monitor. You can always keep what you have for a dual monitor setup.

Anything else is basically just flushing money down the toilet. If you're sticking to 1080p, swapping out the GTX 970 isn't going to give you any noticeable jump.

wiredotter14 said:Honestly, if you're going to do anything, just grab a GTX 1070 and a 1440p monitor. You can always keep what you have for a dual monitor setup.

Anything else is basically just flushing money down the toilet. If you're sticking to 1080p, swapping out the GTX 970 isn't going to give you any noticeable jump.

+1 👍

Nothing else makes sense. ☕

Look, this setup is totally fine for 1080p right now. But honestly? You might be better off just holding out until Veg drops—probably sometime in Q2 this year.

wiredotter14 said:Honestly, if you're going to do anything, just grab a GTX 1070 and a 1440p monitor. You can always keep what you have for a dual monitor setup.

Anything else is basically just flushing money down the toilet. If you're sticking to 1080p, swapping out the GTX 970 isn't going to give you any noticeable jump.

Truth.