re: PC Discussion - Gaming, Performance and Enthusiasts

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One of my bosses splurges every 5 years on a PC (his current build is a 12900K and 3090 Ti from 2022) and he honestly thinks everything will be back to normal next summer.

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He is in for a very rude awakening.

If you game at 4k, no bottle neck. Gaming at 1080p will likely have CPU bottle necking depending on game. 1440p less bottle necking. Honestly wouldn’t want any CPU that has less than 8 cores if you can afford it.

Looking for some advice on whether it makes sense to move from my current gaming laptop to a high-end prebuilt desktop, and what I’d realistically need to spend for the upgrade to feel substantial.

Current setup:
• Acer Predator Helios 18
• RTX 4090 Laptop GPU
• Intel i9-14900HX
• 64GB DDR5
• 1TB SSD
• Laptop display is 18”, 2560x1600, 250Hz
• Purchased in early 2025

For my main gaming display, I have an 83” LG G5 OLED, and I’d like the desktop to be permanently hooked up to that for 4K gaming. So portability isn’t important for the new system. I’d keep the laptop, but the desktop would become my primary gaming machine.

I’m not interested in building one myself, so I’d be looking at a prebuilt.

My biggest question is how high do I need to go for this to actually be worth doing? My laptop is obviously still pretty powerful, so I don’t want to spend $3,000+ on a desktop and end up with something that’s only 15-20% faster.

Would something like a 9800X3D + RTX 5080 be a big enough jump from a 4090 laptop GPU to justify it? Or, given what I already have and that I’m gaming on an 83” 4K OLED, does it make more sense to wait/save and go all the way to an RTX 5090 desktop?

I’m especially interested in:
• Rough performance increase I could expect at 4K from 4090 Laptop ? 5080 desktop ? 5090 desktop
• Realistic prebuilt prices for both tiers
• Whether a 5080 would feel like a major upgrade or more of an incremental one
• What CPU/RAM/PSU/etc. I should be looking for so I’m not getting a prebuilt with a great GPU and cheap components everywhere else
• Any particular prebuilt manufacturers you’d recommend or avoid

I’m not necessarily looking for the best price/performance option. I’m looking for the point where the performance difference is big enough that I’ll turn on a demanding game at 4K on the G5 and immediately feel like the desktop was worth buying.

Curious what you guys would do in my situation.

I just looked up your TV and it’s capped at 120hz. Realistically, you could get away with using a 5070ti easily and just use DLSS and frame gen to make up any performance necessary to max out whatever game you play, but honestly your 4090 laptop GPU could do the same thing realistically, since you only need to get 120fps. Performance level DLSS still looks really good at 4k.

Are you using DLSS performance? And is that with frame gen?

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That’s kind of the reason I’m considering the desktop. I’m not necessarily trying to find the cheapest way to make the FPS counter say 120. I’d like to be able to run 4K at higher settings with Quality DLSS and still get high frame rates.

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Your lowest viable option is the 5070ti. A 5080 is ideal, but at that point your build is going to be over $2k with just a GPU and 32GB of RAM, so your full build would easily be over 3k… if you don’t mind dropping that kind of money then yea I’d go 5080… 9800x3d is the best but you could also save money and go with the 7800x3d which is also still very good for gaming.

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If you were in my position, would you expect a 5080/9800X3D desktop to be a pretty dramatic difference at 4K, or would you keep the laptop and save toward a 5090 build instead?

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The 5080 is about 54% more powerful than the 4090 laptop GPU with access to Multi frame gen. If 54% doesn’t sound good enough I’d honestly wait for the 60 series, but that’s like a year away due to delays based on AI demand. But the 60 series will be a pretty dramatic leap if they are going to the smaller node. 5090 is just a terrible value and not even close to worth the money, even if it’s the best GPU for gaming.