what to upgrade?

Solution
1. Drop the liquid cooler if you do not OC and get the cheaper CM Hyper 212 EVO instead.
2. Drop the GTX980 and pick only either GTX970/R9 390 or GTX980Ti/Fury X. GTX980/R9 390x's price/performance is not that good.
3. If this is a pure gaming rig, no need to go i7 6700.

The rest is ok, I think.
1. Drop the liquid cooler if you do not OC and get the cheaper CM Hyper 212 EVO instead.
2. Drop the GTX980 and pick only either GTX970/R9 390 or GTX980Ti/Fury X. GTX980/R9 390x's price/performance is not that good.
3. If this is a pure gaming rig, no need to go i7 6700.

The rest is ok, I think.
 
Solution
That liquid cooler will be louder than hyper evo 212, does he like when his computer rumbles from inside ? I think not 😀

If he uses 1080p (fullhd) monitor buy GTX970 or R9 380x, for 2k resolution or above get 980ti/Fury X.

Get more watt PSU if you want and 16gb ram
 
Hi,

So if your Friend isn't going to OC, you can use a cheaper cooler - http://pcpartpicker.com/part/cooler-master-cpu-cooler-rr212e20pkr2.

That's another 30$ off, so now we have another 130$ to see if we can't up the GPU.

I see the Mobo only supports CrossFire, and adding another 130$ for a single GPU isn't gna help from a 980 higher.

So Changed the Mobo to support SLI - http://pcpartpicker.com/part/asrock-motherboard-z170extreme3.

That takes 15$ away, so we have roughly ~$580 to spend on GPU's.

http://pcpartpicker.com/part/gigabyte-video-card-gvn970ixoc4gd

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_970_SLI/15.html (Performance difference between 980 vs 2x970)

Thats the cheapest 970 according to the Website, I am sure you can get it cheaper than $300, and now we need to up the PSU a bit.

This PSU looks like a steal http://pcpartpicker.com/part/antec-power-supply-tp750c.

Should bring your total to: 1407.04

Hopefully this helps.
 
For 1080p, GTX970/R9 390 is the best price/performance choice.
They are equal with their own pros and cons.

However,
If he is already planing to upgrade the monitor to 1440p, GTX980Ti or Fury X is the better choice.
Ask him before buying. If he is staying on 1080p, GTX980Ti is quite a waste of money (not a huge waste).
 
16gb ram isn't rly needed true, bf4 is ram hungry game and take close to 6gb of ram so he should be good. R9 390 is smarter choice tho than gtx 970 cuz R9 390 has 8gb and 970 has 3.5gb. New games like to use more gpu vram therefore I would go with R9 390 instead for handling games in the future