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[ShoesandHats]

I'm looking into upgrading my PC, and I'm split between two GPUs. There's a sizable price difference between the GTX 970 and the GTX 980 ($330 vs. $550), but my mouth is sort of watering over the 980. Are there any heat concerns with either? Would a mid-tier power supply unit from three years ago be able to handle them?

I'm also looking to buy an SSD, and I'm not sure whether to invest my money in a better SSD or into the better GPU. Any advice on that front?

[Orange Wizard]

It depends, really. If your processor + RAM is also pretty old then there'd be no point in getting the 980. An SSD is really only useful for loading data from/writing to the disk. If you do a lot of that (and are tired of long wait times) then the SSD might be the better choice.

Upgrading the PSU might also be a good idea, depending on how much power is drawn by your other parts.

[ShoesandHats]

In terms of other parts, here're my specs as far as I can tell/remember:

Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3450 CPU @ 3.10GHz
AMD Radeon HD 7850 (GPU)
P8Z77-V (MoBo)
Can't remember the specific PSU, unfortunately, and I can't seem to find any documentation or distinguishing marks that might identify it.

[ShoesandHats]

Also, for those with one of the cards or more technical knowledge, is the 980 worth the extra $220? The 970 is already almost certainly a big upgrade from my current card, but is the 980 a big enough upgrade from the 970?

[nenjin]

On average, stepping down from the bleeding edge to the almost bleeding edge is a performance drop of 10 to 20%. That seems to be holding true for these cards too. I bought the 970 because I simply couldn't justify the price for the 980. My rig has smashed pretty much every game thrown at it now, so the 980 would have probably been overkill. The differences are also more meaningful at resolutions higher than 1920x1080.

[ShoesandHats]

On average, stepping down from the bleeding edge to the almost bleeding edge is a performance drop of 10 to 20%. That seems to be holding true for these cards too. I bought the 970 because I simply couldn't justify the price for the 980. My rig has smashed pretty much every game thrown at it now, so the 980 would have probably been overkill. The differences are also more meaningful at resolutions higher than 1920x1080.

Out of curiosity, what other components do you have?

EDIT: Also, what kind of cooling system do you have? Just some fans, or one of those fancy water cooling units?

[alway]

On the PSU: From what I can tell, PSU issues are much less likely than they used to be; a lot of the hardware design has had a strong mobile influence lately, reducing power consumption (and resulting heat production). So it actually probably uses less power than a comparable card from previous gens. The 980 and 970 require 165W and 145W, respectively. The specs of the 780 are 250W, for comparison. Very disappointing for those of us hoping to use our PCs as a space heater.

As for the specs:
The 970 and 980 are the same base hardware, created on the same production line; as such, there are no architectural differences, simply a matter of having disabled or tuned down bits in the lower end models (which is good, since we're otherwise comparing apples to oranges)

Same VRAM; textures to high quality will not cause any differences in perf.

The 970 has a slightly lower core clock speed ~7% slower (math operations take slightly longer), however, it has the same memory clock speed (memory operations take the same time). Depending on the code running on the GPU, this may slow it down slightly, but memory access is often the bottleneck in shader code, and quite often the bottleneck in GPGPU compute code. All in all, probably negligible effect from this.

The main difference is the Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) count. The 980 has the full 16 SM units enabled, while the 970 has 13 enabled and 3 disabled. The SM units contain the cores running stuff (128 cores per SM). As such, you can run somewhere around 81% as many threads, and thus is the absolute worst any performance difference between the two could be. Back in the real world, however, this will make less of a difference as you won't be running the GPU at 100% all the time due to overhead ranging from CPU processing delays to memory bandwidth, and as such actual benchmarks put them within a bit lower margin (85%-90%).

[nenjin]

On average, stepping down from the bleeding edge to the almost bleeding edge is a performance drop of 10 to 20%. That seems to be holding true for these cards too. I bought the 970 because I simply couldn't justify the price for the 980. My rig has smashed pretty much every game thrown at it now, so the 980 would have probably been overkill. The differences are also more meaningful at resolutions higher than 1920x1080.

Out of curiosity, what other components do you have?

EDIT: Also, what kind of cooling system do you have? Just some fans, or one of those fancy water cooling units?

Core i7 4950, 16 gigs of RAM, the 970. I don't do liquid, just 6 140mm fans.

[Thief^]

The GTX 970 is an amazing card, and only draws slightly more power than your old GPU (145W max vs 130W max). It's highly unlikely your PSU would be able to power one and not the other.

SSD-wise, I highly recommend the Samsung 840 EVO. It's the previous generation Samsung SSD, so it's not insanely priced, and it's hellish fast. Generally you don't need a massive one, I have the 120GB one in my pc as a system drive and it's not even full. Just use it for stuff that needs really fast loading times, like windows, some programs and DF (but not your downloads folder, or video collection, etc)

That said, pretty much any SSD is a night and day upgrade over a traditional spinning disk. Even more so in a laptop! (got an old 60GB SSD from the company I work for as a laptop upgrade, oh god wow)

[ShoesandHats]

How much of an improvement would an i7 processor be over my current one? I've heard it doesn't make a huge difference except in certain situations that I don't really find myself in that often, so I'm wary to spend another $300 for the upgrade.

[miauw62]

From my own experience, normal HDDs are getting more and more bottleneck-y. When I start up my computer, my disk activity is maxed out for about fifteen minutes while everything else ambles along at a comfortable ~30%. (I have a 7200rpm HDD)

[alway]

And if you're a programmer, you should really get an SSD, as it will greatly reduce compile times.

...

(note to self: buy SSD, seriously, why do I not already have one or two of those)

[ShoesandHats]

I'm posting this from my newly upgraded computer. Turns out the GPU was too big for my case, so I had to run out, buy a new case and basically rebuild the entire computer to get it to work. When I turned it on for the first time, one of the wires fried and smoked, which was scary, but thankfully it wasn't anything essential. It seems like the two fans that came with the case aren't working, so I assume that that's what messed up there. Any recommendations? Installing two new fans at this point would be a huge hassle, given that everything else is already packed in there and the wires are a huge mess.

[Thief^]

As long as the case airflow is ok (gfx cooler and PSU both of the "extractor" type, i.e. blows air out the back of the case), you may not need case fans. Did you plug a fan in backwards? It sounds a little like you shorted something.

[nenjin]

I'm posting this from my newly upgraded computer. Turns out the GPU was too big for my case, so I had to run out, buy a new case and basically rebuild the entire computer to get it to work. When I turned it on for the first time, one of the wires fried and smoked, which was scary, but thankfully it wasn't anything essential. It seems like the two fans that came with the case aren't working, so I assume that that's what messed up there. Any recommendations? Installing two new fans at this point would be a huge hassle, given that everything else is already packed in there and the wires are a huge mess.

Well you seem to be taking it pretty well. If I'd seen smoke and fire in my newly built case, I'd have lost my shit.

And yeah, GPUs of that size basically start requiring you get at least a midtower.

From my own experience, normal HDDs are getting more and more bottleneck-y. When I start up my computer, my disk activity is maxed out for about fifteen minutes while everything else ambles along at a comfortable ~30%. (I have a 7200rpm HDD)

Possible you just have too much crap going on, too. From POST to having control of my desktop and my HDD idling down, it's about 20 seconds from the time I hit the power button and type in my password. I imagine that will take longer as time goes on but...15 minutes of HDD spinning is bad, and probably fixable with a defrag and a few other things. Because I'd bet it something stupid like a program trying and failing to update, or something like Origin profiing your system, etc...