3080/5800x PC Upgrade

 

I ended up replacing the CPU cooler with a Scythe Fuma 2 due to the heat produced by the 5800x.

Instead of waiting for the Nvidia 4000 series GPUs, I upgraded my 5700 xt to an EVGA 12 Gig 3080, along with my Ryzen 7 3700x to a Ryzen 7 5800x. After seeing the prices for the high end 4000 series, I feel fairly justified in spending 799 on a 3080. EVGA, probably the best Nvidia partner, also just pulled out of the graphics card market, citing abuses by Nvidia, so I guess I lucked out in grabbing my EVGA card. On paper, it's a big upgrade over my 5700 xt. With 4 more gigs of memory as well as hardware ray-tracing support, my 3080 should be almost 50 percent faster than my old card at conventional rasterization. The 5700 xt doesn't support ray-tracing, so I now have access to that much hyped feature, along with Nvidia's superior DLSS upscaling. The CPU upgrade should give me a little more headroom, as the 5800x is probably about 15 to 20 percent faster in single core applications compared to the 3700x. It's a hot little bugger, and I had a lot of problems with it until I installed the Ryzen chipset drivers.

So how much faster is my pc now? In Assassin's Creed Odyssey, I went from 62 frames per second at 1440p at the highest settings to 92 fps, with my 1 percent lows improving from 40 to 50 fps. Halo Infinite now runs flawlessly at 120 fps at ultra quality 1440p, whereas I was getting around 60 to 70 fps with  occasional frame drops below on my 5700 xt at medium quality. Ray-traced games like Spiderman Remastered look amazing, although the cost to frame rate is pretty huge. Honestly, Quake 2 RTX is the most impressive ray-tracing demo I've played. It'll be interesting to see how the technology develops with the release of the 4000 series, since the X Box Series X and PS5 are pretty deficient compared to Nvidia in that department.

All in all, it was a big upgrade, but not exactly as transformative as my i5-2500k to Ryzen 3700x jump. Here's to holding off the consumerist urge to flush money down the toilet for another 3 to four years.

Guess which one is the 3080?