1. This extremely difficult to answer without a budget. Also, a decription of what you do with it (apps / games you run and how often) is helpful but as your subsequent comments are all about gaming, I'll focus on that. I don't understand the "waste to invest in this platform" comments as upgrdainga GFX card or storage is not a "platform investment".
2. You said
"So put pc in shop to get some upgrades and not seeing a noticeable change to be honest. Maybe offline ever so slight but gaming def not. " Frankly the fascination with SSDs is misplaced. Great, the SSDs are 3 times faster ... problem is it only has a real usr impact on stuff you almost never do. They have no impact on productivity, and rarely have an impact on the actual "user experience" because THE USER is typically the bottleneck in any system.
a) If you copy / paste 500 GB of files, the SSD will do the job much faster ... but how does that impact you after the day you build your PC ? If one want to copy 500 GB of files, I initiate the transfer and then go back to perusing my forums. So what if it gets done in a fraction of the time, no impact on the user cause he / she us doing something else. No Impact !
b) SSDs will have an impact in certain applications like video editing, animation and rendering, but that's not you AFAIK.
c) Boot time on this box is 15.6 secs off SSD, 16.5 off the SSHD and 21.2 off the HD ... will that impact your life ? Do you sit and watch the hourglass or ratating circle or whatever is on screen ... or are you adjusting your chair, returning calls, clearing off desk whatever while it boots ?
d) After finishing work, and switching to game mode, after launching game, I may do any number of things such as, unplugging charger cable for headphones, taking out the dongle from left eat hidey hole, closing the cover, placing on head, launching discord, grabbing a snack, taking a bio, launching web pages for game. I don't care if it takes 12 or 20 seconds to load cause Im not ready to play for 30 seconds or more. The MMO, I play primarily takes the exact same amount of time off SSD, SSHD or HD cause the server handshaking is the bottlneck
In short investing in a SSD for gaming fps is a waste of time and money.
3. Your main issue is your GFX card ... the 1 TB SSD is $170 .... a GFX card will cost ya much more... but as you said, the SSD did squat for gaming performance. The 960 was a weak card in comparison with other . A 1060 will be about twice as fast as your 960... the 6 GB model is 6% faster than the 3 GB model but the VRAM is not the factor here; the 6 GB has 10% more shaders and that is what provides the speed boost. In the past, Id recommend the 3GB because of the $100 price difference... now it's often $10
https://tpucdn.com/reviews/MSI/GTX_1060_Armor/images/perfrel_1920_1080.png
6GB 1060 $250 -
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814137053
On ebay buying a 1060s is as low as $120
On ebay there's 960s as low as $45
Buying new and selling the old on ebay should cost you about $200 and you'd see an immediate doubling of fps. If ya can manage an extra $100, you'd get about 2.6 times the fps as you have now.
4. The 4969k / Z97 combo is just fine... Im running Z87 / 4770k, my son is running a 2600k ... no issue with 970 SLI or 1070 cards. While generation to generation GFX card performance has increased as much a s50%, with CPU generations, it's been at best 5%. Have run all my games by setting affinity from 8 cores on down and never saw a significant impact till i was running on only 3 cores.
5. The RAM is a good move, the only one I'd do after getting new GFX.
