I'm refurbishing an older PC for my fiancée. We mainly play Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Portal 2, It Takes Two, and similar games at 1080p/60 Hz, though we may eventually move to 1440p. It isn't used for competitive gaming or demanding modern AAA titles.
I have the opportunity to buy a GTX 1080 Ti with 11GB of GDDR5X memory and a custom AIO cooler installed about a month ago for under $150. The seller says it has been fully tested, and I would install it in my system and test it before purchasing. Even if it isn't a practical upgrade, the card is interesting enough that I might buy it as a piece of gaming history.
The current system has an Intel Core i5-6600K, an ASUS GTX 1060 6GB OC, an ASUS Sabertooth Z170S motherboard, 16GB of Corsair DDR4-2133, and an EVGA 850W 80+ Bronze power supply. I may replace the aging PSU and CPU cooler as well, since the system is around eight years old.
Would the GTX 1080 Ti be a worthwhile upgrade for this build? How much would the i5-6600K and slow memory limit it, especially at 1080p?
3 Answers
The 1080 Ti is still a very capable card, especially for 1440p, and it would be a major step up from the GTX 1060. For your current games and 1080p/60 target, it should work well. Just remember that the custom AIO is an extra failure point, so inspect the installation carefully and check temperatures, pump noise, and clock speeds before buying.
The i5-6600K will hold the card back in some situations, particularly in newer games, busy scenes, or anything where you want high frame rates. The biggest issue may be frame-time consistency and 1% lows rather than average FPS. At 1440p the GPU will do more of the work, so the limitation will usually be less noticeable. You may also be able to enable XMP or manually run the DDR4 faster than 2133 MHz, assuming the memory and board support it.
For a purely practical purchase, a newer card such as a used RTX 3060 or RX 7600 XT could be preferable. They are more efficient, newer, and offer modern features such as better upscaling support; an RTX 3060 also has newer ray-tracing and encoding capabilities. However, under $150, a tested 1080 Ti is still a reasonable performance upgrade if you specifically like the card and don't mind the AIO risk.
A newer entry-level card may perform similarly or better in supported games, but the 1080 Ti remains a fun and surprisingly powerful option for traditional rasterized gaming.
It is impressive how well these cards have aged. A fresh thermal paste job and a healthy cooler can still keep one running nicely, but the cooler's long-term reliability matters more than the card's age.