People underestimate the CPU load of modern games. There's a lot of graphics API overhead in current D3D and GL (though D3D12 and Vulkan will improve upon that), use of dynamic scripting languages (most notably Lua), and most engines don't make the best use of all cores either. And of course, your game is probably sharing the CPU with a number of other applications, which probably aren't hitting the GPU nearly as hard.
Given that, plus the fact that it's a lot easier to upgrade a graphics card than a CPU, makes me think it would make sense to spend more on your CPU than GPU on a fresh build.
(the grandparent comment has been deleted, so I don't know what the context of this discussion is, just throwing my thoughts out there)
> As a gaming enthusiast, my rule of thumb has been to have more general compute (CPU cores and system RAM) than graphical compute
I also have to ask why? An Intel Pentium with a GTX980 will run almost all AAA games at max settings, except a few outliers (BF4 is the only one I can think of right now).
