668 - Neighbor of the Beast

And it only cost me $45 above what I would've paid with tax anyway - about $825 in all. Considering some people are selling these things for SCALPER prices (I've seen them going for $950 easy, on cards whose MSRP is like $719), I got away with it fairly lightly. Still got scalped, of course, but a $45 scalp is a hell of a lot better than a $200 scalp.

So now I expect that I'll be probably killing far too many hours in No Man's Sky once it comes out next month. And pretty much any other recent game that would've made my 690 chug due to VRAM limits and SLI buggery. (A 690 was two 680s on one GPU in SLI, for the uninitiated.)

Next up, a 1440p monitor that'll cost about as much as the damn GPU did - goes for about $750-800 online. But to be fair, this monitor's like eight years old now... so old, it's not even true 24-bit color. Ack. Once I get that, though, I'll finally get GSync goodness, and it'll be a higher refresh rate, better color reproduction, and of course, bigger - 27 inches as opposed to my current monitor's 22 1/2. Will have to get DisplayPort cables, though, since DVI is pretty much a legacy connection now (but it's what my current monitor supports).

Not much bigger in terms of rez, though - 2048x1152 vs. 2560x1440. 4K isn't quite doable by a single GPU yet (Pascal Titan X might?) in the most intensive games (older stuff should be just fine, of course - unless you're Crysis), but for 4K you really need a super-expensive setup at any rate, so it's probably better to wait another 3-5 years for that at least; by the time it's worth it it won't cost all that much more over a 1440p monitor today, if that. (That said, I'm not predicting that until consoles really begin to become powerful enough to do it in terms of mainstream appeal, and by "do it" I mean at a native hardware level, not the mere upscales that XBox Scorpio/PS4 Neo are doing; native 4K is definitely PC enthusiast tier right now.) For now, 1440p is still above console resolution quality, and the 1080 will run pretty much anything you throw at it at at least 60 FPS at that rez. Even the 1070 should still be pretty good (and is your bang-for-buck card this generation for sure).

Then it'll be down to the other components, like a new processor, motherboard, case and (possibly) RAM if I end up buying a CPU that uses DDR4 as opposed to my current rig's DDR3, but piece by piece I'll get it done. GPU and Monitor were the most important things anyway. This Sandy Bridge'll hold out for a bit longer (It's already had a five year run - not bad, old girl), but once I've got the new monitor, getting everything else I need would probably be only about the same price as the GPU or Monitor alone, maybe a bit more.