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.
2muchcoffeeman•Jul 18, 2026
I still run a 2014 Mac mini and a 2012 MacBook air
ngcc_hk•Jul 15, 2026
Crazy for me to still own two
Wistar•Jul 18, 2026
I own four in my office. Daily driven, mostly with photo editing tasks but some Blender, too. Work well for us.
gchamonlive•Jul 18, 2026
They still have great value in the used market. Swapped mine for a 3090, also used, for ~20% rebate.
fishgoesblub•Jul 18, 2026
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.
jandrese•Jul 18, 2026
The RAM crunch has been a quiet victory for those older cards. I have a 10 year old video card in my rig that had at the time a decent but not chart topping 8GB of RAM. Developers are still targeting 8GB because so many of the cards released today still have that. Since I'm still using 1080p the performance is usually acceptable too. Surprisingly the biggest problem is becoming the CPU, with the i5-3570k lacking a few of the later SSE instructions and being completely unable to run some titles.
steinvakt2•Jul 18, 2026
To be fair, the 5060 with 16GB is not that much more expensive than the 5060 8GB.
ramgine•Jul 18, 2026
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.
gdevenyi•Jul 18, 2026
My 1080ti is my local inference machine now. With the release of the Bonsai 27B models I can run a genuine dense model with usable context. GOAT card.
embedding-shape•Jul 18, 2026
What exact runtime are you running Bonsai 27B with right now and what variants of the weights are you using?
mrandish•Jul 18, 2026
I have a 1080ti currently not plugged in. More info please.
ls612•Jul 18, 2026
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.
RavSS•Jul 18, 2026
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.
Argonaut998•Jul 18, 2026
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?
embedding-shape•Jul 18, 2026
> so I think it's time for an upgrade, what do you recommend?
Without knowing what you'll use it for, probably a 9970x + RTX Pro 6000 would do the trick, YMMV.
nbf_1995•Jul 18, 2026
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.
epolanski•Jul 18, 2026
What's legendary about the 1080? It's a smaller 980ti on a much smaller node.
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.
keyringlight•Jul 18, 2026
Something I can't fault nvidia for is long term vision. If you ignore all the non-gaming uses, I can't see significant gains to be had by keeping evolving rasterization based rendering, which presumably would hit diminishing returns, upgrades would be less exciting, and be easier for AMD and others to compete against them. The trouble is a variety of reasons has meant that long term is likely going to be over a decade from when it was introduced before it's really commonplace or part of the furniture for the majority of games.
iammjm•Jul 18, 2026
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!
muro•Jul 18, 2026
Those were great and 1070 was a great deal. Upgraded to a 3080 from 1070 last year, they are quite reasonably priced now.
arjie•Jul 18, 2026
Haha that’s amazing. I thought these things were practically worthless. Gave mine away for free on Reddit.
leoqa•Jul 18, 2026
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?
You can layer models across multiple GPUs for inference. If you pooled it into one system, that would be 72gb of some pretty damn fast memory. Would be great for dense models in the 30-50b range.
BenyD•Jul 18, 2026
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
whoisnnamdi•Jul 18, 2026
1080ti is a remarkably great card that landed at just the right time - by far my longest used card before I needed an upgrade
16 Comments
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.
My PC did coincidentally die today (not GPU related) so I think it's time for an upgrade, what do you recommend?
Without knowing what you'll use it for, probably a 9970x + RTX Pro 6000 would do the trick, YMMV.
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1m5fkts/my_prac...