Upgrade path for my current PC?

I know this isn't exactly the place for this but you guys are smart and the spambot at Tested is not smart and banned me twice because I guess I had too many links in my thread...? Here's my copypasta:

So I've got a pretty old CPU and GPU rattling around inside my rig and games are starting to really chug so I think it's time to upgrade. I have an i5-2500k and a GTX 560ti right now plugged into my Gigabyte Z68AP-D3 mobo.

I've been reading variousarticles and I think I'll be ok with an i5-4690k and I guess the GTX 970 is the budget hotness? Trying to not break the bank here. I figure I'll slap a Samsung 850 Pro or SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD in there for good measure. I'll be reusing 8 GB (2 sticks) of Corsair Vengeance RAM as well as a Corsair TX650 PSU and my 1TB Western Digital HD for the more boring stuff.

Does this make sense? Also what motherboard do I need? I'm about as clueless as I can be on that front.

GPU first for sure, your current PSU and motherboard can handle it. You may not even see that big of a performance increase if you went to a 4690k from an i5-2500k, at least in games.

My suggestion is to go with a GPU first and then see what your performance looks like. If you are playing at 1080p/60 I doubt you need much more of an overhaul than that, unless you really wanted to go further. You could always get a good CPU cooler and overclock the hell out of your current chip, too. And yes, GTX 970 is the card to get right now.

Your old PC isn't really under-speced. Like MB, I'd say upgrade your GPU first and have a look. These days the biggest bottle neck is your hard discs, so upgrading to an SSD will help.

I'd start with a new GPU and an SSD. If the performance gain isn't enough, then ok, replace the rest.

For your non-SSD storage, if you install your games on there, you can consider setting up a RAID5 with 3-4 discs (increase read speed over a single large disc) or hybrid drives.

When you say it's "starting to chug", do you know what is your bottle neck? Long loads? Low FPS? Randomly hanging? Have you looked at your RAM utilization to make sure you aren't running too much stuff in the background and your PC is using the page file for instance.

I wouldn't call the GTX 970 a budget card...nVidia has yet to release a budget chip for that generation (GTX 960 coming soon). It's a pretty powerful card. I think you could probably save a little money by going with a Crucial MX100 SSD of your preferred size instead of a Samsung. Note quite the performance but you'll never notice the difference.

IF you're sure you want to jump up to a socket 1150 i5, any socket 1150 that meets your other requirements will do. I recently spec'd a system using the MSI z97 Gaming 3, but you could save some money on that by getting a board that doesn't support SLI/Crossfire if you never plan on buying a second video card. Sounds like you only need a couple SATA connections, so just be sure you'll have enough USB ports and you're happy with the other features of the board.

You could try to find either an i5 3570k or i7 3770k that may be a bit cheaper because they're a generation older. You wouldn't have to upgrade the motherboard either because they're socket 1155. Honestly, you're looking at single digit FPS increases from a CPU upgrade anyway.

@starvinggamer: Nothing about a i5-4690 and a 970 is "Budget Hotness". In fact, I believe Tom's Hardware refers to both of them as "high-end". And the difference between that i5 and the i7 lines are exceedinly minute, plus the difference between a single 970 and a single 980 is also minimal. (Multi-GPU setups have a ton of bugs in software too, so I usually find them not worth the hassle)

Feel free to look at these, if you like:

Tom's Best Gaming GPU's for December

Tom's Best Gaming CPU's for December

Now, that being said, you're only going to see a maximum ~30% boost from the CPU, and that's if all the stars align for CPU load. For your GPU, you're going to see a significant boost from 560ti to 970. Like, most game benchmarks I can find seem to indicate that you'd see 200% better FPS than you see right now in best case scenarios (that's triple, not double). So I'd definitely say upgrade the video card then see how you feel about it afterwards.

Edit: Oh, and don't bother with SSD for your main storage. It's definitely worthwhile as an OS drive, but they can be finicky as game drives if the games patch a lot. That said, if you have something you play constantly and forever, it can be nice to see them load in an instant.

Double Edit: The above edit was my opinion. I didn't realize I worded it so strongly until I had already hit save.

@mb: That sounds like a good jumping-off point and something I can just do without having to hem and haw about it.

@noizy: It's the FPS on higher-end games like DA:I and FC4. Also startup seems to be taking longer but I honestly just need to format this HD. It's been accumulating bullshit for years.

@telexen: I'll keep that mobo info in mind. I'll also look into that other SSD.

@silver-streak: Thanks for those links, I'll give them a peruse. And yeah, the SSD is just going to be for the OS, evergreen games like CivV, and whatever the latest single-player game is that I'm going to delete as soon as I'm finished.