I guess I asked for that!
Obviously a Titan Z would be silly, but say a ~£200 GPU may be worth it over the £130-£150 270X GPUs. I don't want him to have a GPU that gets held back by his CPU for example.
The goldilocks of GPUs is what he's after.
It's easier to look at it like this:
The CPU controls the the lowest lows and the highest highs. The GPU will just change where the average is.
There are instances where the only thing holding you back is the CPU, which is mostly UE3. A better GPU is still going to be felt in that case though.
The big major studio AAA single player type games (that are *not* UE3) are generally always GPU bound, and will perform almost identical between a $100 CPU and a $1000 CPU.
So really, just buy the best single GPU that is possible within a given budget. There is no such thing as buying "too much".
Nonono if you are going to OC get the Pentium and a Z97 100%.
Busy all day today, hope someone can respect for you like Good/Great.
This this this this this. It's not going to have super long legs, but if you're on a Z97 board with a Pentium, and two years down the road you need something with 8 threads, you can buy a 4770k/4790k/5790k and just pop it in.
I honestly wouldn't even touch anything between the unlocked pentium and the 4670K because IPC is still that important for gaming. There are 100000000 titles that will perform better on a 4.2 GHz Pentium than they would on a 3.0-3.4 i3/i5. There's only a tiny handful that would perform better on the i3/i5.
I'd really like to point this out in bold, but the Pentium should theoretically give almost identical performance in Source/UE3/MMO games to even the 4790K. In other words, if you play Dota 2, buy it.