I'm still using a 1080ti in my main PC, though I don't play as many games as I used to. Control is the last title I picked up where I really felt like I was pushing the graphics capability of my rig.
I remember when I built my PC I was surprised when I'd come across a post of someone running ancient (at the time) chips like the i7-870, and now I'm realizing I am one of those people.
My 2700X and 1080ti do plenty of what I need these days. I meant to upgrade both a couple years ago but between job changes and then tariffs and whatnot it just never quite made sense to commit to the jump. I have a hard time imagining what an ideal upgrade would even be now with how expensive everything's gotten. I'm mostly hoping my machine continues to hold up for another couple years.
It's amazing how great the 10 series was. The 1060, a budget card, had the same amount of VRAM as the previous generations top tier card (6GB) with the 1080Ti having 11GB! the 5060 for example has only 8GB, the same as the GTX 1070 and 1080.
I just threw together my old 1060 in a steamOS - adjacent box running cachyOS. It’s great for couch co-op platformers. The GPUs were overkill for most games then and can still run new indie 2d games now.
I had a 1080 in my previous build, it was an OC model that went from 180 up to 250W and could perform about halfway between a stock 1080 and a 1080ti. That was a nice card but by late Covid it was really showing its age.
My old 1080 Ti now sits inside a 4U rackmount server. It's an EVGA SC2 HYBRID version and I am still amazed that the AIO cooler hasn't failed yet or leaked everywhere. One of the best things I've purchased in retrospect since it was my main GPU up until the middle of 2025, even though at the time in 2017 I felt the price of 1.5k NZD was extreme.
I have a similar plan for my 4090 once it's gaming days are over. I'll retire it into my homelab (I specifically massively overspecced the power supply in anticipation of this) and run whatever local AI models exist in 2028-2029 which can fit on it.
Mine is still going strong, it can run Gemma 4 26b. It can still play all the games I care about at near max settings at 1440p at 60 FPS (like Elden Ring).#
My PC did coincidentally die today (not GPU related) so I think it's time for an upgrade, what do you recommend?
Ryzen 5000 cpus are extremely cheap right now. I bought a 5900xt (16 cores) to upgrade a server a few weeks ago for ~$250. If you already have DDR4 you could put together a system for pretty cheap if you need it soon.
The downside is that AM4 is basically EOL, so no upgrade path.
But it is even more about timing. Nvidia shifted to RTX afterwards, opting to go for raytracing and upscaling instead of making strictly faster cards. Which made the last GTX cards very competitive for regular usage, raising its status.
Funny enough, I have the 1080 and I tested qwen 3.5 9b on it today. I was positively surprised with the experience. It's no Opus but it did OK on the couple of queries and tasks I gave it. It's pretty impressive for a 10 year old gpu!
If it had more vram it could really cook. Qwen3.6-35b-a3b quantized to 3bits is genuinely usable for coding running on the ten year old pascal card with 16gb i picked up recently.
I have 3 3090s, all in various gaming computers. I’m not sure what to do with them- the VRAM is only 24GB so doesn’t seem worth the power costs to run an open weight model. Any suggestions on how I can run them as some type of cluster? Is it worth exploring NVLink?
1080 is a great card but the 1060 is an absolute king for its price back in the day, owned one and used it for quite a long time really. golden era of gaming and nvida
I still have one too in a home server to power a local AI model. That being said, even my 3090 is starting to show its age. Recent games require aggressive DLSS (performance or super performance) to maintain at usable 70-80fps at 4K. That being said, in practice the upscaling isn't very noticeable.
This might be a unique assessment. My perspective is that Intel's strong lines were 4th gen and then 12th gen.
I see a number 4770 and 4790 still doing the job they were bought for. I expect the same for 12th gen when they're 13yo. Not so for anything between 4th and 12th.
I bought two of these when they were new. I don't recall the price, but after mining some bitcoin in my electricty included apartment for a few months over the winter instead of running the heat, I think I ended up with ~.5 BTC.
i still have a gtx 1080 in my machine. But nvidia just dropped support for them, and some games will forever remain glitching (ex 007 first light flickers like crazy on proton)
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 57.0 ms ] threadI remember when I built my PC I was surprised when I'd come across a post of someone running ancient (at the time) chips like the i7-870, and now I'm realizing I am one of those people.
My 2700X and 1080ti do plenty of what I need these days. I meant to upgrade both a couple years ago but between job changes and then tariffs and whatnot it just never quite made sense to commit to the jump. I have a hard time imagining what an ideal upgrade would even be now with how expensive everything's gotten. I'm mostly hoping my machine continues to hold up for another couple years.
My PC did coincidentally die today (not GPU related) so I think it's time for an upgrade, what do you recommend?
The downside is that AM4 is basically EOL, so no upgrade path.
But it is even more about timing. Nvidia shifted to RTX afterwards, opting to go for raytracing and upscaling instead of making strictly faster cards. Which made the last GTX cards very competitive for regular usage, raising its status.
1080 here with 7950X3D+96GB.
I see a number 4770 and 4790 still doing the job they were bought for. I expect the same for 12th gen when they're 13yo. Not so for anything between 4th and 12th.