Potential Upgrade Questions

[sfrench11189]

I have some extra money and am considering upgrading my PC, and I have some questions regarding what's worth upgrading. My PC is just used for gaming, no video editing or any other intense uses like that.

My current set up is:
i5 3570K
GTX 680 4GB VRAM
4x2 GB ram
Asus P8Z77-V motherboard
850W PSU
Asus VG248QE monitor
64GB SSD
2 1TB HDDs

My main questions are:

GPU: In terms of performance, would it be better to purchase a second 680, or just to upgrade to a 780/780 ti?

CPU: Is an i5 still good for a gaming rig, or is it useful to upgrade to an i7?

RAM: I don't imagine it's worth it to upgrade to 16GB of ram. But if I did decide to do it, is there any real difference in performance between using a 4x4 or an 8x2 set up?

Any other opinions/suggestions on what/how I should upgrade are more than welcome.

 

[tiny voices]

An i5 is all you need. You will see very little to no performance upgrade in gaming with an i7 over an i5.

8gb RAM is still plenty and you will not see any gaming improvement with 16gb.

The ONLY thing to change for a real performance gain, if it you feel you need it, is the GPU. If you want the most power, 680SLI is significantly more powerful than a single 780. BUT, if you do not want to deal with the hassle associated with SLI, a single 780TI would be a very good upgrade.

 

[sfrench11189]

I know when I built this last year, I was contemplating running 2 cards, but everyone said a lot of games weren't optimized for SLI and actually had worse performance unless you turned 1 card off. So I take it this is still an ongoing issue?

 

[tiny voices]

With mainstream games no, it is not really an issue, but if you play alot of indie or Alpha/Beta games, I would stay away from SLI as basically none of them use it at all.