Hi guys,

I made a thread a couple of months ago with a similar question but at the end of the discussion I came to the conclusion that the upgrade I was going for at the time wasn't worth it.

This time however, I am making a big upgrade instead of a small one

Current setup:

AMD 960T @3GHZ x6 Unlocked
GTX 560ti
530w beQuite PSU 80+ Bronze
8GB DDR3 1600 RAM
M5A78L/USB3 Mobo

Here are the upgrade options! Either I get a GTX 970 or an i5 Haswell CPU + Mobo. I was thinking of the i5 4690k, any motherboard suggestions?

Which one of these will be a more significant upgrade? I play lots of games and have been noticing that I need to play with lower shadow settings etc nowadays however, I'm still playing on high fine. I game at 1080p on a 60hz monitor.
Games I play >

CS:GO
Diablo 3
Guild Wars 2 (Very CPU dependent which my current CPU doesn't handle well)

I always play the latest games that come out i.e lately it's been Shadow of Mordor and Lords of the Fallen however, those 3 are my most played.

Throw down a heatsink and overclock your CPU, it will compare to the newer FX-6300 and even beat it in multi-threaded performance.

Buy a GPU first - If you're still unhappy after the new GPU and CPU overclock, then hop on the new CPU train.

buy an intel and all problems solved

I would get CPU/mobo. Thats me tho. I used that card for the longest time (still using until my 970 comes lol)

If the OP's motherboard had more than 3+1 phases, I would agree to have the CPU overclocked; the CPU probably has headroom, even with all of its cores unlocked, but those extra unlocked cores might not overclock the same as the original unlocked cores, so over clocking might not go too far, and it could be unsafe if that motherboard has 3+1 phases.

My mentality is to push hardware to the limits before making big purchases, go hard or die trying; I guess that's why most of my systems are Core 2's.

If the OP would eat the cost of a nice AM3+ motherboard, that unlocked 960T might reach 4GHz, which should provide grunt for a nice card later, but the upgrade would be an 8xxx CPU, which wouldn't be much of an improvement unless extreme cooling were used to achieve a high overclock.