I need to replace or upgrade the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 8GB in a used PC I bought about three years ago. I use the system for gaming, streaming with OBS, and video and photo editing. My editing software stopped working about a year ago, some games have started struggling, and OBS is now reporting that my graphics driver is no longer supported or is missing features I use regularly. I have very little experience building or upgrading PCs, so I'm not sure whether the GPU is actually the root cause or which newer cards would work well with my system. My current specifications are an Intel Core i7-8700, 32GB of RAM, and the GTX 1070. I'd like to spend less than $1,000, with around $700 being preferable. I've been considering an RTX 5060 Ti, but I'm unsure whether it would be a good match for the rest of the computer. What upgrade or troubleshooting steps would you recommend?
4 Answers
A graphics card upgrade will probably use most of your budget, but if you decide to refresh the whole platform, this may be a reasonable time to do it. With compatible DDR4 memory, you could potentially reuse your 32GB and upgrade the motherboard, CPU, and GPU rather than replacing everything. That said, the i7-8700 is still usable, so a GPU-only upgrade may be the better first step.
If you’re spending close to $700, an RX 9070 XT could offer excellent performance. If you mainly want a newer card with current driver support, there are also several options under $400. Just make sure the card fits your case and that your power supply has the required connectors and capacity.
Before buying anything, I’d question whether the GTX 1070 is really the cause. It is still supported by some NVIDIA Studio drivers, including support for applications such as Premiere and OBS through NVENC. A clean or fresh Windows installation could be worth trying first, since corrupted software, drivers, or other configuration problems may explain why several programs stopped working.
The i7-8700 can still pair well with a reasonably powerful graphics card. An example system using that CPU, 32GB of RAM, and an RX 6700 XT can handle modern games at 1440p with high settings, often around 55 FPS natively and closer to 70 FPS with FSR Quality enabled. Unless you need substantially more performance, keeping the current platform and upgrading only the GPU could be practical.
There aren’t many current choices at the very low end, but cards like the RTX 5050 and RTX 5060 are among the newer budget options.