Should I buy upgrade my GTX 1060 GPU only or the rest of the system?

Terry from Malaysia is curious to know if he should upgrade his GPU or his entire system based on an Intel 6600K.

Question by Terry from Malaysia | Answered by in Video Cards & GPUs on

Hi TweakTown. Should I buy upgrade my GPU only or the rest of the setup?

I am planning to buy the new RTX 3060 Ti for the upcoming games. My current GPU is ASUS Strix GTX 1060 6GB. I am currently playing at 1080p. But I want to crank it up higher to 2K or possibly 4K. Recently, I saw a used GTX 1080 Ti, look at the reviews, all positives accept slow shipping. The seller will give it 1-month warranty coverage from the date of purchase. The price is $433. Here are my specs:

  • Motherboard: ASUS Z170 Pro Gaming
  • CPU: i5 6600k
  • GPU: ASUS GTX 1060 6G
  • RAM: 2x 4GB 2400MHz GSkill Ripjaw
  • Storage: Silicon Power 512 SSD, HGST 512 HDD, Kingston SSDNow 240GB
  • PSU: Thermaltake 650W fully modular PSU

Any advice would be appreciated!

Hi Terry,

Looking over your build and going off my personal experience, you will likely want to stick to 1080p until you can upgrade the entire system, as any money spent on a GPU upgrade will be bottlenecked by your 6600K.

Should I buy upgrade my GTX 1060 GPU only or the rest of the system? 1

That being said, if you have the spare cash, you could build up a pretty solid 1440p build with a Zen 2 Ryzen 5 processor. I would up that to a Ryzen 7 3700X and then pick up a B550 motherboard to save some cash. You will likely want to pick up a 16GB kit of 3600MHz+ memory, but you could bring over your entire storage array and probably use your 650W PSU and then add that 3060Ti to finish it off.

Additionally, this move gives you room for further upgrades down the line. For instance, the system above will likely run 4K at low/medium settings but can easily be upgraded if you ever want more detail or higher FPS by simply swapping out the GPU to something like the RTX 3080 or Radeon 6800 XT.

You can also upgrade the CPU down the line to Zen 3 to give yourself higher IPC in single-threaded applications or just more cores if you ever start working with video/photo editing etc.

Related Tags