What upgrade route should I take?

[Roar87]

I'm looking to transition from my 1080p build to a 1440p build.

I'm currently running the following:
2500K @ 4.2ghz with a H100
16gb 1600mhz RAM
GTX 970
ACER Gsync 1080p 144hz 27" monitor.

I'm looking to move to a 7600k build with a 1070 and a 27" 1440p 144hz screen. What would be the best way of upgrading? I don't want to buy all the parts at once, so I'd probably want to upgrade the CPU/mobo/ram, then graphics card, then monitor over the next 6 months or so.

Which part/s should I buy first? I mostly play Overwatch competitively so I'm worried if I took the dive straight onto a 1440p monitor my fps would suffer (high fps is a must for me). Hope this makes sense.

 

[varkanoid]

To be honest I would be tempted to buy the monitor first to see how well your current kit does. Reason being is if you do update the rest of your parts you will be able to see the benefit more and have a better baseline to see whether it was money well spent if that makes sense. As for Overwatch just turn down the details a tad if it struggles.

 

[EsaT]

Increasing display resolution demands more from GPU, because there's more pixels to calculate per frame.
CPUs load depends purely on how many frames must be calculated per second.
So if current frame rate is GPU capped increasing monitor resolution would linearly decrease fps at same graphical settings.
Again if something else (CPU, or say frame rate limiter) is capping it, increasing resolution doesn't decrease fps until GPU runs out of available "horsepower".

Then again smaller pixel size would allow lowering FSAA level in the first place.


For CPU only current Intel "desktop" platform CPU I would consider good for many years is i7 7700.
All others are limited to four threads.
While majority of games likely won't be using well more than couple threads still for year or two there's so much stuff running on background, that those can easily momentarily clog only 4 thread capable CPU causing framerate drops.
Fewer higher clocked cores can give higher peak framerates if game uses only few threads, but couple more cores with lower clocks can easily win in overal smoothness by decreasing amount/severity of framerate drops.
You have to remember that in reviews they use basically clean OSes without all that software installed in normal use PC.

And would be really looking into Ryzen.
There are no easy single core/IPC performance advances left for Intel so for major performance increases game developers are going to have to improve multithreading of games.
And i7 7700 is still only quad core CPU (level Intel reached decade ago) and other four threads come from SMT.


In graphics cards I would wait for few weeks before any kind upgrade decisions.
AMD's current cards are all basically using many years old architecture so it's no wonder if those struggle to be competive.
Vega is first truly bigger architecture change in many years and likely finally brings back some true competition to high end.