Mid-Range System Upgrade: R9 390 to RTX 3070 w/ i5-8600K

[More Sly]

Thought I'd post the results of my upgrade in case someone with a mid-range system like mine is looking to buy.

System Specs:

Processor	Intel Core i5-8600K 3.6 GHz 6-Core
Motherboard	MSI B360 GAMING PRO CARBON ATX LGA1151
Cooling	Cooler Master Hyper 212X Dual Fan 82.9 CFM CPU Cooler / 5x Phanteks PH-F140SP 140mm Case Fans
Memory	G.Skill Trident Z RGB 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3000 CL16 Memory
Video Card (current)	Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3070 8 GB GAMING OC Video Card
Video Card (previous)	MSI R9 390 8 GB Video Card
Power Supply	EVGA SuperNOVA 750 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply

Key factors -
The R9 390 was a well loved 5-year-old card. I'd seen some throttling lately, presumably from heat, and had recently changed the thermal paste and tightened fans and such. Have a thread about it here.
Before benchmarking the RTX 3070 I ran Gigabyte auto overclocking software. Kept the heat very low for now (default), so I image it's a pretty achievable speed. Unless I got an insane win in the silicon lottery, but it doesn't look that way in 3DMark. Here's my curve below.

Process: Straight forward. I only really dip my toes into this stuff. Ran GPU-Z with Heaven and 3DMark's Time Thief. Small heat soak in Heaven, but not much.

R9 390:

RTX 3070:

So, I'm pretty happy with it so far. GPU-Z logs attached. Not sure what I have in the way of better bechmarks but I'll post more if I do them.

Hope this helps!

 

[droopyRO]

Too bad you have that 8600K on an B360 board. With a decent Z370 you can get 4.7-4.8Ghz easy. And 5-5.1Ghz with delid and liquid metal.

 

[More Sly]

When I originally built it about 2 years ago (VC was a carryover) budget was a much bigger concern. I was looking at the Z boards and really considered it, but didn't know as much about processors at the time. Definitely a regret, but for the money I think I got pretty good value. I think my thought at the time was that it didn't make sense to get a higher end board while going i5.

My plan for the future is to fit a waterblock to that old video card and do an ITX built with it. When/if that happens I'll probably upgrade the mobo and processor in this rig and use them for it. Otherwise, maybe a good sale happens and I decide to swap out the mobo. Thanks for pointing it out, I still don't really think about mobo consequences a lot.

That said, resting just under 4100 MHz. I'm not dissatisfied. I'll keep and eye to see how much/ if that bottlenecks since processor speed is a question a lot of mid-range owners have been asking about. I'll be doing 2K play mostly now, so not sure how relevant it'll be. But it's not really my area.