Hi everybody,

I need a double advice about PC building.

First of all I am helping a friend building his own Gaming PC and would like to have some advice about a possible build as even if I have some good knowledge in PC hardware I am far from an expert.

His budget is around 1800$ with an absolute maximum of 2000$ all in Canadian Dollars currency.

He wants obviously a gaming PC (mid-high-end with this budget) that will be able to run beautifully and smoothly the AAA games principally.

He will use a TV as a monitor so no need to buy one, he however needs all the other parts. The case/keyboard/mouse don't need to be flashy or RGB absolutely although it can be nice. He is mostly interested in the performance of the PC and not in its aesthetics.

He wants to have all the parts around Christmas.

Finally, a simple windows 10 software will do the job.
___________________________________________

Now for the second part of my advice-seeking, I want to use this occasion (my friend ordering his parts and building a PC) to upgrade my own PC.

Here are my specs:

Software : Windows 10 Home - 64 bit

Processor : Intel Core i5-4590 CPU @ 3.30 GHZ

Ram : 8GB

Graphic Card : Nvidia GeForce GTX 970

My budget is around 500$ to 600$ and from what I observed the bottleneck of my system would be my CPU so I am looking to upgrade it along with adding a bit more RAM to get up to 12 and maybe a little extra hardware memory if possible. I also need some thermal paste also then.

My PC is obviously also for gaming almost exclusively

Any advice is greatly appreciated

Thank you