Buy a nice monitor, upgrade my rig, or...?

[itsNikku]

So, I built a pretty bad PC. I nabbed a used GTX 780 for 180 usd, about 20 bucks less than the current gen RX 480 4g, and way less than the GTX 1060 6g. For the CPU...I got an Athlon 860k and a crap mobo with no voltage control. Max stable OC on the CPU is 4.3 GHz. Ram is ddr3 at 1866 MHz. Since about a week after the pc was built, I've been running this pc off of a loaner monitor from a friend that's 1920x1080, 60hz. I would like to upgrade the monitor to a 1440p display, but I understand that at certain points, my CPU just cannot handle the GPU load, even at 1080p. However at 1440p (via NVIDIA control panel) I see nearly the same GPU load (plus a bit more) but the CPU is still maxed

 

What I'd like to know is:

Should I upgrade my cpu/mobo this black friday and nab a 1080p monitor for keeps? or...

Buy a nice 1440p monitor, as the same bottlenecks exist in the same fashion at that res, or

Just wait for zen/kaby lake in 2017 and make a monitor choice then?

 

For the budget, I've got about 370 dollars I'd be absolutely willing to spend. While zen may be advertised as super cheap and offer (potentially) i7 performance at i5ish prices, the current skylake i5's/i3's, either ghetto OC'd (via downgraded bios) or just stock (65/6600) are enticing. If black friday comes, I may just be able to upgrade the CPU/mobo/ram, but be left with a terrible budget for a monitor, considering even the base skylake prices.

 

All that said, I feel like most of my games are still somewhat playable. By downgrading GTAV to 50hz (or gasp...30) I see very few prominent stutters that take me out of the experience. Any other games that are not CPU intensive run damn smooth at 1080p 60hz.  Reallistically, my budget may allow for a 1080p monitor and an i3/z170 combo (if the price is right) but I'm not sure if that's how I want to play games for the next year and a half or more. 

[gtx1060=value]

why in the world did you get a 780 and an athlon??? That's about the worst bang for the buck ever. No offence. If you could still return all the parts and you have the original packaging, do it

[itsNikku]

I'm not sure if I can, but I'll check with newegg to see if I can return the athlon/mobo/ram. The whole PC was built very recently. As to why...it...sortof worked?

 

Edit:I'm beyond the point of return at this point. Looking forward, it looks like the cpu should come first, and monitor second. Thanks for your help and criticisms!

[DarkBlade2117]

9 hours ago, itsNikku said:

I'm not sure if I can, but I'll check with newegg to see if I can return the athlon/mobo/ram. The whole PC was built very recently. As to why...it...sortof worked?

 

Edit:I'm beyond the point of return at this point. Looking forward, it looks like the cpu should come first, and monitor second. Thanks for your help and criticisms!

Have you tested 1440p? The 860k is a great price to performance CPU though more on the lines of a RX 460. Along as you can get decent FPS and minimal drops you'd be fine.

Also note, you should of got a 290/x

[itsNikku]

1440p inValley Benchmark runs fine. The 780 is definitely capable of 1440p, the Athlon is not capable of anything. And I really didn't know about the used AMD card market, so not sure if I could have gotten a better deal there. Regardless, 60fps seems out of the question for the 860k in GTA V. But with Half-Refresh it runs smooth and I can crank the graphics settings, so that's cool. Adaptive regular Vsync seems to crash GTAV every time I load it.