Your current casing form factor is?

 

3 mainstream - ATX, mATX, mITX

Alright that's ATX.

Intel Core i3 6100 - RM 470
Gigabyte H110M-DS2 (D4) - RM 276
Kingston 8GB DDR4 2133MHz Value RAM - RM 145
Palit GTX950 2GB GDDR5 Dual Fan - RM 635
Corsair VS450 - RM 162

Total: RM 1688 (ETech price inclusive of GST)

I've used a mATX mobo in the build list since your ATX case can fit all 3 form factors, it is more cost efficient since you mentioned prefer to stick with 1.5k 

Yup
That's 2nd gen i3 vs 6th gen i3, improvement is estimated to be around 30%.

And for GPU, GTX950 is around 50% faster than GTX650(Ti).

If bump to 2k, you can either upgrade the i3 to i5 or GTX950 to something more decent only, if you can add in 200 more then you can upgrade both.

Intel Core i5 6402P - RM 707
Gigabyte H110M-DS2 (D4) - RM 276
Kingston 8GB DDR4 2133MHz Value RAM - RM 145
PowerColor RX470 4GB GDDR5 Red Devil - RM 899
FSP Hexa+ 550W - RM 188

Total: RM 2215 (ETech price inclusive of GST)

7870XT is on par/slightly faster than GTX950.

The cheapest or lowest end Nvidia Pascal lineup is GTX1060 3GB currently, packing the performance of GTX970 at price tag of RM 9xx.

Intel Core i3 6100 - RM 470
Gigabyte H110M-DS2 (D4) - RM 276
Kingston 8GB DDR4 2133MHz Value RAM - RM 145
Palit GTX950 2GB GDDR5 StormX - RM 609
WD Blue 1TB HDD - RM 209
FSP Hexa+ 450W - RM 166
Tecware F3 - RM 125

Total: RM 2000 (ETech price inclusive of GST)
The 12V rails in the stated PSU is able draw a maximum of 312W from the wall, based on the power draw reported by online reviews, the PSU is able to handle the load of RX470/RX480/GTX1060, if you have other components (those power hungry one) to hook on this PSU then it is recommended to get a better one.

Skylake Xeon CPU requires C232 chipset mobo and it is not cheap to get so stick with Core i5 family is a wiser choice for now.

Intel Core i5 6500 - RM 835
Gigabyte B150M-D3H (D4) - RM 379
Kingston 8GB DDR4 2133MHz Value RAM - RM 152
Gigabyte RX470 4GB GDDR5 G1 Gaming - RM 999

Total: RM 2265 (ETech price inclusive of GST)

Optional build/upgrade:
1. Zotac GTX1060 6GB GDDR5 Mini - RM 1169 (Merdeka promotion till end of this month by Zotac MY)
2. Zotac GTX1060 3GB GDDR5 Mini - RM 949
When you overclock the CPU.

For locked (non-overclockable) CPU, you can just get a decent RM 150 3rd party CPU cooler to reduce the temperature if it gets too hot when you do the rendering, but of course you can spend more money to get a decent liquid cooler AIO if you want the temperature to be even lower.

If your current PSU doesn't have any 8-pin PCIe power connector then it is better to get a new one with native 8-pin PCIe power connector, but you can use molex to PCIe converter/adapter if you want to stick with current PSU, it is not recommended in the long run though because it is not designed to handle a card with 8-pin PCIe power connector (6-pin max).

The CPU cooler "reply" by me isn't for you, it is for another question asked by another forumer.



But yea only certain CPU models (those overclockable) don't come with stock cooler and 3rd party cooler is required to run the CPU.