Hi! As the title says, I am thinking about upgrading my system for the last time to max out the current build.
Mainboard: Asrock AB350 Pro4 with a PCIE4.0 16x slot
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5950X
Ram: 64BG DDR4-3200
Current GPU: Nvidia 3070Ti 8GB
PSU: 800W, more than enough.
Storage: 1 TB M.2, 2TB M.2 SSD /w extra controller in a PCIE 4x slot, a fuckton of HDD storage
I am thinking about switching out the 3070TI with it’s measly 8GB VRAM that is simply not doing it for 1440p Gaming with a AMD RX 9060XT 16GB, which is pretty cheap and available right now, esp when i take the resale value of my 3070TI into account, which would account for a bit over 100€ for the upgrade, which is quite substantial in performance.
I cannot for my life find any compatibility information between my Mainboard and the AMD Card. I know i lose a little bit of performance because it’s a PCIE5 Card in a PCIE4 Slot, which to my knowledge shouldn’t be too much of an issue, but i wanted to ask if anyone has knowledge if there are issues with compatibility here.
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Almost all pcie versions are backwards and forwards compatible. You could put a pcie 5 video card in a pentium 4 machine and it should work.
To my knowledge, PCIE4 versus PCIE5 is irrelevant at 1440p.
You probably can’t find compatibility info because PCIE is always backward and forward compatible when it comes to a 1:1 slot:card ratio. Unless you are splitting the PCIE lane, using one of those GPU + SSD combo cards, you should be fine.
Thanks for reassuring me! The more i upgrade this system, the more i am scared to make a misstep - this pc has grown a lot over the last year, and the GPU switch is the last thing i can reasonably change to max this AM4 platform out, everything else will need a new Mainboard/CPU/Ram, and with the current DDR5 prices this is simply not a sound financial decision.
PCIe N cards normally work fine in PCIe N-1 slots, so long as there isn’t some other problem (like insufficient power). If they didn’t, there would be many fewer GPU upgrades in the world. :)
I think you’ve done well in choosing to replace Nvidia with AMD, since this will lead to a smoother experience (or at least more options) if you ever decide to escape Windows.
Oh i am already running Nobara as a daily driver for a year now, which works fine with Nvidia cards (i expected more issues, but was pleasantly surprised at my smooth experience stability- and bugwise). But the 8 GB VRAM of the card is pretty reliably the bottleneck now - i can monitor usage while playing, and VRAM usage forces me to reduce quality in a lot of games, or live with degraded performance.
I once ran an RTX 2080 in an LGA 1366 X58 motherboard lol, I think you’ll be fine
While I don’t know specifically of any compatibility issues, have you checked PC Part Picker? You can enter all your components into the site and it’ll tell you if there’s any potential compatibility problems.
I didn’t know about that site, thanks! it even mentioned both the necessary bios update for the cpu and that one pcie 4x slot gets deactivated when the M.2 slot is used - i knew that, but i’m impressed they implemented that.
That makes me pretty optimistic about my chances, thank you!
No problem! Glad I could help!
System-core-wise, my setup is similar to yours. I also recently upgraded (arguably, sidegraded I guess?) from a 3080FE (10gb) to an RX 9070XT (16gb) that I found a deal on last month, with the intent of finally jumping ship on windows and converting to Linux for my gaming box - already got a bunch of Linux machines between a couple spare laptops and my homelab stuff, but gaming was my last major windows use case… and their market capture is frankly crumbling lately, what with how shit W11 is. I’m not planning on upgrading my setup any further in the next couple of years, because it handles whatever I want these days @1440 qhd pretty great.
I switched over to Linux a year ago, i chose nobara, which doesn’t have any obvious issues with my setup - they even made a small GUI tool for switching between open and closed, stable and beta Nvidia Drivers with a few clicks, which is a lot more comfortable than anything i experienced on windows. So i can attest that if it’s done right, Nvidia cards do their job just fine under linux.
The limiting factor is my VRAM, which simply isn’t enough for 1440p if i want games to look good too. reducing the Resolution is doesn’t look too good :-/
