Upgrade GPU or CPU and Motherboard

[Kevin_Smith]

Hello guys,
I was wondering whether you think I should upgrade my GPU or CPU, Motherboard and Ram on my brother's gaming pc (my old rig).

Basic Info about him:
My brother doesn't care for CPU dependent programs. He's an average young gamer that plays regular games such as CSGO and TF2, but also plays AAA games aswell.

Pc specs:
Processor: i3 4130
Graphics Card: Gtx 770 2GB Vram
Motherboard: Some Old Intel non-gaming one.
Ram: Kingston 8GB DDR3 1333mhz

Additional Info: I actually swaped in my gtx 1080 into his rig and most games worked fine at ultra 1080P, but games like Just Cause 3 bottlenecked hard yet still got more than 60 fps at ultra.
While his gtx 770 struggled to play games at high range in my rig (Specs in description)

My Question:
Should he upgrade his Graphics Card to a gtx 1080 (maybe a gtx 1070ti if price and performance are satisfying, if rumors are even true) even though he might experience bottlenecks at some cpu intensive games or should he just upgrade the ram, cpu and motherboard? (Suggest something a bit future proof)

Thanks in Advance! (Written from Phone)

 

[Turb0Yoda]

The CPU would be the bottleneck, even with a 770 imo.
Used Haswell i5s are decently cheap, shop around.

 

[geofelt]

You did for your brother what few people can.
You tried a gts1080 upgrade and found it satisfying.
Go with that or the rumored GTX1070ti.

60 fps is not bad on ultra, so you still have options.
Amazing what a good gamer a simple I3-4130 can be.

 

[Kevin_Smith]

The CPU would be the bottleneck, even with a 770 imo.
Used Haswell i5s are decently cheap, shop around.

Thank you for replying to my question, but he's gonna get a full PC upgrade by the end of the year so I'm just looking for which to upgrade first.

You did for your brother what few people can.
You tried a gts1080 upgrade and found it satisfying.
Go with that or the rumored GTX1070ti.

60 fps is not bad on ultra, so you still have options.
Amazing what a good gamer a simple I3-4130 can be.

Thank you for you reply! You do have a point there, your comment definitely encouraged me to upgrade the GPU.

I'll still like to hear a bit more opinions from you guys out there, thanks again!

 

[geofelt]

If you want to explore the cpu vs. gpu issue, here are a few tests you could do:
a) Run YOUR games, but lower your resolution and eye candy.
If your FPS increases, it indicates that your cpu is strong enough to drive a better graphics configuration.
If your FPS stays the same, you are likely more cpu limited.

b) Limit your cpu, in windows power management, limit the maximum cpu% to something like 70%.
Go to control panel/power options/change plan settings/change advanced power settings/processor power management/maximum processor state/
This will simulate what a lack of cpu power will do.
Conversely what a 30% improvement in core speed might do.

You should also experiment with removing one thread. You can do this in the windows msconfig boot advanced options option.
You will need to reboot for the change to take effect. Set the number of threads to less than you have.
This will tell you how sensitive your games are to the benefits of many threads.
If you see little difference, your game does not need all the threads you have.

 

[Kevin_Smith]

If you want to explore the cpu vs. gpu issue, here are a few tests you could do:
a) Run YOUR games, but lower your resolution and eye candy.
If your FPS increases, it indicates that your cpu is strong enough to drive a better graphics configuration.
If your FPS stays the same, you are likely more cpu limited.

b) Limit your cpu, in windows power management, limit the maximum cpu% to something like 70%.
Go to control panel/power options/change plan settings/change advanced power settings/processor power management/maximum processor state/
This will simulate what a lack of cpu power will do.
Conversely what a 30% improvement in core speed might do.

You should also experiment with removing one thread. You can do this in the windows msconfig boot advanced options option.
You will need to reboot for the change to take effect. Set the number of threads to less than you have.
This will tell you how sensitive your games are to the benefits of many threads.
If you see little difference, your game does not need all the threads you have.

Thanks again for your quick and detailed reply! I tried this out and realised that it does bottleneck at a few different games with a few different settings. On the other hand, I didn't find the bottlenecking to affect the overall game experience, since like I said games still run above 60 fps. Moreover, the gtx 770 showed little improvement when switching from the i3-4130 to the i7 7700.
My conclusion: In order for my brother to feel a significant improvement in his Gaming experiecne, he needs to get a new graphics card, so that when he actually upgrades his other components later this year he will also feel another performance boost.