Upgrade suggestions

The Smart Guys® should be along shortly ... but I'd hazard a guess at the following:

Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 1070 8GB
System Memory: 16GB

Power Supply: 600W Digital Storm Performance Series may need to upgraded as well.

Just my 2¢...

Originally posted by Cretae You're very near the edge of benefitting most from a system purchase. The next six months will bring new procs from AMD and Intel, as well as a new round of GPUs from Nvidia. Everything will fit together to vastly improve your performance with "third tier" parts. That is, an up-coming i5 CPU from Intel, and a 4070 GPU will run rings around a mere GPU upgrade, and allow for another 5 years of quality gaming at 1440p at least. The 12600K is already ~24% better than your proc, and the newer one will beat that. I could easily recommend a 3060 Ti upgrade as most bang-for-buck at this moment, but your CPU/mobo combo would continue to fall behind the curve in newer games. This is a very exciting time with what's right about to come out, so I think you should look into it at least. I've specced out a best guess budget build in a Lynx case along the lines I'm suggesting at around $2500 custom built. That would be with 32GB of RAM. I'm guessing the new procs will cost around the same, and the GPU may come down a bit. For a system that would carry you as much as 5 years out, I think it's worth the short-ish wait to see what happens.

To be fair this system has carried me for almost 6 years so its done a pretty good job, just a couple minor replacements here and there. Just to make sure I understood, you think waiting for the next gen i5 and the 4070 and putting them into a lynx build would be the best option? $2500 seems a bit low to me just because you'd be dealing with a new GPU and we all know how scalpers can screw up the prices but I'll gladly take your price haha. I'm not too well versed in the computer parts world so I'm intrigued as to why you would stay with the new i5 rather than upgrading to an i9? Thanks for the help!

The newest offerings from Intel feature a hybrid core configuration that brings more total cores and threads to the table, even in the i5s.(Ten cores, 16 threads.) That extra bit plus the inevitable speed increase up to 4.9 GHz Turbo convinces me that a gamer would be wasting his money getting more. The new gen will be at least a bit more efficient, and maybe more. I think the Intel i5s are going to be the chip of choice for gamers going forward.

The Lynx case was chosen just for the free RGB and economy. I looked at a build that might have what you'd want at the lowest price I could guess at, without skimping. There is a fudge factor. You can select any case you wish, and spend more on whatever you want. I was just suggesting a killer rig would not necessarily break the bank. For the record, I upgraded the mobo, and stuck with DDR4 memory. I chose a Samsung 980 500GB for primary drive, and a 1GB DS NVME SSD. The dual fan AIO is fine for an i5, and I selected an 850W PSU. I didn't get specific on purpose because I don't know your budget, and the prices are TBD. A fair guess is all it is.

Bottom line, after six years with all the tech improvements that have come along, I think it's time for a new system. If you bought now, I think you'd be kicking yourself in six months when all those new goodies hit.

If you really want to save, it's bound to be really interesting what the two upper Lynx prebuilts might look like.