Researching an ascension. Any input/advice much appreciated. Keep in mind, I live in Canada so prices are roughly 10,000,000x what you guys enjoy in the US.

I'd swap the R7 out for a 750Ti personally and do this. The 750Ti is still a capable card, has life left in it, and is also cheaper than the R7.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

Type Item Price
CPU Intel Core i5-4690K 3.5GHz Quad-Core Processor $303.33 @ Vuugo
Motherboard Gigabyte GA-B85M-D3H Micro ATX LGA1150 Motherboard $80.57 @ Amazon Canada
Memory Crucial Ballistix Sport 8GB (1 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory $58.46 @ DirectCanada
Storage Seagate Barracuda 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive $56.33 @ Vuugo
Video Card EVGA GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2GB Superclocked Video Card $169.99 @ NCIX
Case Cooler Master N200 MicroATX Mid Tower Case $56.24 @ DirectCanada
Power Supply EVGA 500W 80+ Certified ATX Power Supply $49.99 @ NCIX
Operating System Microsoft Windows 10 Home OEM (64-bit) $122.00 @ shopRBC
Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
Total (before mail-in rebates) $916.91
Mail-in rebates -$20.00
Total $896.91
Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-10-15 16:37 EDT-0400

You'll be fine on the 750Ti at 1080p for some time. You can look into upgrading it sometime in late 2016 or early 2017 (at the earliest) when the next gen video cards have come out. We'll either see the next gen cards and their high bandwidth memory be so awesome we all want one. If they're more of an incremental improvement, they'll still drive down prices on things like the R9 390 and GTX 980Ti.

/r/pcmasterrace Thread Link - ca.pcpartpicker.com