Help my friend upgrade

[mojo6912]

He has $360 USD to spend.

He has
Z170 1151 socket motherboard
skylake i3
a gtx 960
8 gigs of 2133 ram 2x4GB
he has a SSD

He plays at 1080p 60hz right now. All variety of games. Not WoW currently.

I'm thinking a 7700k. I told him to get the z170 board a while back for the upgrade path. I would feel like bad telling him to ditch it and get a ryzen, even though he could grab a r5 1600 and a board with his budget.

960 is weak as hell but gpu market is crap right now. GPU would probably be my recommendation otherwise.

Maybe a nice monitor? I'm sure his monitor is a generic crappy one.

He ordered Ripjaw V 32GB of 3600mhz cas16 RAM 2x16GB for $355 and I told him to cancel it and let me think about it lol.

What would be the best quality of life improvement if you were in this situation?

[gutnbrg]

what was he planning on doing with 32gigs of ram????

[mojo6912]

I dunno, a ramdisk I guess =P.

[Fascinate]

One of the rare occassions id suggest an i5:
PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel - Core i5-7600K 3.8GHz Quad-Core Processor ($214.99 @ Amazon)
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master - Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler ($29.99 @ Amazon)
Monitor: Acer - GN246HL 24.0" 1920x1080 144Hz Monitor ($182.99 @ B&H)
Total: $427.97
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2017-07-10 22:29 EDT-0400

He can sell his i3 for ~75 bucks on ebay, putting him right at the budget limit.

[mojo6912]

Nice suggestion, thank you. What if he bumped up the budget a bit more and already had a nice cooler. Would you recommend something different?

[Fascinate]

Not really, unless he had enough for a 7700k and a monitor.

[Tiberria]

My recommendation would be to sit on and either wait until GPU pricing is less of a shit show, or until he can save more to do more of a full rebuild. I don't see an upgrade from an i3 to i5 being all that worth it given that the 960 is probably his primary bottleneck, and given that even the i5 doesn't look like it has much of a shelf life (Intel is moving to more cores with Coffee Lake), I would not buy a new Kaby Lake CPU at this point; it's just bad value for the money.

Just wait until the 1060s or RX 580s are down to their proper <$300 price points and pump the upgrade money into that; it's by far the biggest improvement he could make. Once GPU prices settle, even a 1070 would possibly be at he upper echelon of that price range. Another option is you could look into the availability of 2nd hand 980 Tis. As long as his PSU can handle a 250w TDP GPU, that would be a massive upgrade, and could probably be had in the $300-350 price range.

[Thunderball]

Anything below 1080Ti and better than 1050Ti is crazy overpriced right now, so I wouldnt even look towards GPUs at this point. I would get a 7700K and an AIO to go with it.