Upgrading my tower - have some questions

[stuykid89]

Hey everyone,
I've had my tower for almost five years now. Sadly it's unable to play any recent games up to the standard that I would like it to, so I've decided to upgrade my GPU. However, my fear here is that the rest of my components will end up bottlenecking the system. Ideally, it would be wonderful if I could get away with just replacing my GPU but I realize that may not be the case. My tower specs are as follows:

Motherboard: ASUS P8Z68-V/GEN3
CPU: i5-2500k @ 3.3 GHz
RAM: 16GB (4x4) 1600 MHz
PSU: Cooler Master 750W Bronze
GPU: EVGA 560 Ti 1GB

I would like to upgrade the GPU up to a 970 (I know the 1080 just came out but it's too much $$). So if I do move forward with the 970, would the rest of my computer be able to keep up, or should i just go for a complete overhaul?

A maybe unrelated question here - I've also gotten a "CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT" BSOD twice in the past four days whenever Skype was running. Does this have any impact on my system upgrades?

Thank you!

 

[clutchc]

No problem. The venerable i5-2500k is still strong enough to keep up with the GTX 970. I had one until recently, myself. But get ready to play all games at max/near max specs if you game at 1080p.

I can't answer your other question. I'm a bit of a purist when it comes to gaming. I disable everything but what I need to game with. Give CCleaner a run. It might find some software conflicts or other issues. Same with running a virus scan and malwarebytes scan for resource-wasting malware.