RedJamaX

Bottle necks are subjective to the setting you are trying to play at... Your GTX960 is the bottle neck right now. Check out this post I made on bottlenecking... It includes tests and benchmark results using the 4 different processors with the GTX960 and the 980Ti...

Or the slightly scaled back GeForce 2MX http://www.ebay.com/itm/NVidia-GEForce-2MX-VGA-Video-Card-/142040400054?hash=item21124480b6:g:WSYAAMXQ1d1TI78Z http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-nVidia-GeForce-2MX-32MB-AGP-Video-Card-TW-05G998-69700-/272293039269?hash=item3f65ee0ca5:g:HrEAAOSwwo1Xdeyy

This is good... still a bit faster than the cards for the days of the PII... but it'll definitely work... http://www.ebay.com/itm/Elsa-Gladiac-32MB-AGP-Video-card-GeForce2-nVidia-/112022526779?hash=item1a15101b3b:g:qAAAAOSwmtJXWX5Z

Branding and manufacturing are not the same thing... (even if you consider design assistance)

Just to be clear... you did not connect a separate audio cable, correct? the Audio was playing on your TV with only the HDMI connected.. yes?

Depends on your budget... Of you get a system that will work with the i3-6100... you can upgrade just the CPU later for a reasonable price and get a nice performance boost... If you go with the 2500k, you will probably be looking at a whole platform upgrade the next time around. If the price difference is within $100, and it's in your budget, I would strongly recommend the i3-6100

sorry... thought you were looking for results with Intel CPUs and the 980Ti

Batman Arkham Origins, Watch Dogs and the 3DMark SkyDiver test are probably all good examples of a good CPU-GPU balance, You can see how they scale with increased power with both components.

Lots of benchmarks in my review on bottlenecks... using the 980Ti and 960 paired with 4 different CPUs...

^^^ This

Test it first... It's worked for me on three systems and 4 different graphics cards (GTX960 2Gb, GTX960 4GB, GTX970, GTX980Ti)

Sorry for the confusion... I never actually needed to do this before. But, it looks like you would need a converter like this one: http://www.ebay.com/itm/4K-x-2K-HDMI-to-HDMI-and-Optical-TOSLINK-SPDIF-3-5mm-Audio-Extractor-Converter-/151879472737 Basically, HDMI out form your video card, into the converter... then OUT from the converter you'll have HDMI to your monitor (using an HDMI to DP cable), and Audio out to your speakers... Again, I've never used those so I do not know if it would cause any video lag or not... for gaming, that would be highly annoying. But it might be worth a try.

dont use that last link... that was not the correct cable...

The HDMI-only side would go into your monitor... and then other end goes into your HDMI-in for your monitor. The 3.5mm cable coming out of that end would go IN to the input pf your speakers... of course, this also requires that you have speakers which accept an Audio-In port. BUT, if you has speaker with their own built in 3.5mm cable, then you could get a 3.5mm stereo-coupling adapter to connect the two.

Coil Whine is amplified through the Audio... I don't know the technical reason why routing the Audio through the HDMI works... but it's worked for me on several machines.