I got a helluva deal at MicroCenter last holiday 
So you’re looking at a full rebuild, with motherboard, CPU, RAM, etc… The full boat?
Do you want a pre-built or do you want to build it yourself? Prebuilts have two disadvantages to even out how much easier it is: they tend to come with crappier parts, and also they can get fucked up in shipping, especially if they connect the video card and then ship it. Buying the parts individually lets you get, for example, a nicer power supply for peace of mind, but also all the individual parts are much safer during shipping.
Putting together a computer is approximately the same difficulty as putting together IKEA furniture.
Oh, no sorry! I was unclear on that. Not a full re-build or pre-built. Just looking to upgrade a few parts where necessary and/or practical. Honestly, this machine doesn’t fail me in very many aspects; I just have the itch to tweak something.
Since I want to keep the mobo, CPU will necessarily stay since it’s as much as is compatible. Apart from that, tweaks to GPU/RAM?
I’m leaning towards new GPU, but considering the rest of the build is a little bit behind cutting-edge I don’t want to overshoot on the GPU if it will be running away from the rest of my components.
No. The Killer Instinct game I got was a remake of the 1997 one.
It’s a 2013 video game
I don’t think it will, really. Outside of unusual cases like cities skylines, most games require way more GPU than CPU. Your 7700 should be fine.
For a video card, for your monitor, if you’re an Nvidia guy I’m thinking a 3070 (~$500). AMD looks like maybe the 6800, with 10% better frame rates at 1440p but also costing 10 to 15% more.
Do you happen to have the model number of your case so we can verify which video cards will actually fit in it?
In terms of RAM I would either just get two more sticks of exactly what you have, or replace what you have with 32 GB of faster RAM, say 3200 MHz. Gskill has some decent cheap RAM sticks.
What’s your power supply situation? A video card upgrade will likely necessitate a better power supply. (Google says a 3070 recommends a 650 W power supply. I’d probably rather have 700 W or 750 W to give a little headroom.)
Do you care how loud it is or how it looks? Do you want RGB lighting? Do you mind if it sounds like a hair dryer? (Hyperbole; they’re all reasonably quiet.)
I have a 650W PSU; if necessary I can trade with my son’s machine which has 750W and is much more than he needs (again, got a screaming deal and thought it would be good futureproofing).
Case is an NZXT H5 flow.
I don’t care a whit about RGB lighting. When I built this I actually bought more fans to put in the case, but they’re just kind of sitting on the shelf because I haven’t needed to bring my temps down.
Uugggh…just tried again to parse out the differences between the eleventytwelve different variants of the 3070, 3060, etc.
…still old. If my problems turn worse, I’ll make a new thread.
Nice! Good call, well done.
I mean, I don’t know what’s up with this price, and it’s super short but weirdly tall so don’t get for narrow cases, but this Zotac 3070 on Amazon is $450. That’s kind of nuts; the standard 3070 price for everyone else everywhere else seems to be more like $530. Maybe people hate the weird size?
Would you consider something more powerful, like a 3080 or AMD equivalent, or would that be extravagant compared to what you’re thinking? Your monitor has some headroom.
You’ve been awesome, thank you! 
Actually $450 for the GPU is probably around my price point, with some room above in the case of extraordinary screaming deals. I think I’ll definitely just go ahead and pick up 32GB of RAM as well while I’m at it. Side note, kiddo is doing to be very happy with his hand-me-down GPU and RAM 
Will it matter if my mobo only supports PCI-E 3.0 and not 4.0?
My understanding is that it absolutely will not. PCIe is supposed to be fully forward and backward compatible without issue.
Awesome.
If you mean the different brand names of each model, the variance will be less than between models. Every 3070 will be faster than every 3060 TI, etc… Brand differences are typically a slight overclock, RGB lighting and how loud the fans are.
If you mean the difference between the models, here’s how I think of them:
3050 budget 1080p gaming
3060 decent 1080p gaming
3060 ti good 1080p, budget 1440p
3070 decent 1440p
3080 good 1440p, budget 4K
3090 decent 4K
All the ti’s go in between, except that the 3070 TI in particular has a reputation of not being worth the extra money.
Oh yeah, also light hash rate (LHR) can be ignored. It means it’s been gimped so it won’t mine crypto as well. At a certain point, ALL 30 series cards became LHR, so it’s not something you can reasonably choose not to get.
You really shouldn’t be seeing performance issues on a 2013 game. I was thinking if it was literally the original 25-year-old game that was being run in an emulator, performance issues wouldn’t be a surprise. But an actual 2013 release? That should run well, especially on a new system you just bought. (Any new system.)
I just had a crazy thought, along the lines of “did you try turning it off and on again?”
Are you sure you plugged your monitor into the correct spot on your computer? Your system might have come with integrated graphics on the motherboard / in the CPU. Or the CPU might not offer onboard graphics but the motherboard still does.
In that case, you’ll have your choice of whether you want to plug your monitor into your video card or into your motherboard. If you plugged it into your motherboard, you would absolutely experience obnoxious performance issues on a 2013 game. Integrated graphics is terrible.
With an i7-7700, I’d go with an AMD 6700XT. That’s probably just over the bottleneck threshold so I wouldn’t go heavier than that. You can pick it up for $370-$425 and it’ll offer about a 70-100% bump over the 1660 Super.
The 6700XT is roughly the same as the RTX 3070 so you could grab either without feeling like you’re doing it wrong.
So here’s what I went with:
Acer Predator Orion 5000 Gaming Desktop
Intel Core i7-12700F
16GB DDR5 Memory
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080
1TB Gen 4 SSD
$1,865.93 after tax (free shipping)
Another $143 for 32GB of DDR5 RAM
brings the total to $2,008.93 Which is about the most I’d want to pay for a PC (and from what I can tell, seems like a relatively good price with Black Friday deals)
I could have gone with a RTC 3070 version for a few hundred less, but screw it.
And as I understand the naming convention, the i7-12700F doesn’t include an internal GPU (which isn’t really a problem) or the ability to overclock like the KF (which I don’t really mess with anyway)
Nice!
Good call on doubling the RAM. A little pricey but DDR5 isn’t cheap. Also, I assume by “SSD” you mean NVMe, which again, nice!
The 12700 should be solid. Agreed that neither integrated graphics nor overclocking really matters. Paired with a 3080, that should be really nice.
How much memory on the 3080? Google says they come with various amounts: 8, 10, 12, or even 16 GB.
Yeah my first activity with my new PC will be Googling “how do I turn off RGB lights.”