Quick advice for an upgrade to a 2008 PC

[Methos5K]

I'm gonna run this one PC until it dies, so I'm going to put a little $ in it for the meantime to improve gameplay. It's a Dell XPS 435MT. Core i7 920. 12 GB DDR3 Trichn. EVGA GTX 950 SC+. I've confirmed that I can put an i7 980 in this Dell MB no sweat; but is that really worth it? Or should I go for the GTX 1060 6GB instead? Plan on a brand new rig next year, so just gonna put $250US into it until then. Used LGA 1366 CPUs are easy to get from old servers. New 1060 or used i7 980? Whatcha all think?

 

[scuzzycard]

The extra cores in the i7 980X won't really help in your games and you could just overclock the i7 920, so there's not much point to the 980X. As for the GPU, I would aim a little lower. You wouldn't see a difference between the 3GB and 6GB version of the 1060 because your CPU is the bottleneck and by the time games really need 6GB VRAM, you'll have moved on to your new rig. You could take what's left of the $250 and spend it on a CPU cooler instead and overclock in order to close the performance gap between your CPU and your GPU.