Good. :)

Of course, you would see a benefit.
Whether you are CPU limited or not really depends on the game, even then the bottleneck will shift dynamically from the CPU to the GPU depending on whats happening on screen.

Of course, from experience when you have a GPU that easily outstrips the CPU and you have GPU cycles going to waste, you can usually dial-up effects that are done on the GPU such as Anti-Aliasing and take basically no performance hit, the CPU however will keep back your minimum and maximum framerates.

The problem with the Athlon 2's is the lack of IPC in lightly threaded tasks, so games which are heavily threaded will obviously be best on your system.
Have you also tried to unlocked your Athlon 2 x4 at all? Some chips will allow you to unlock the L3 cache and turn it into a Phenom. (You do that, by enabling Advanced Clock Calibration in the BIOS - Also reffered to as ACC)

The R series is going to mostly be re-badged Radeon 7000 series cards, the same cards we have been using for the past 2 years.
The R9 290X however is brand new, but it's pointless to even consider it because it's well out of the Op's price range anyway.

Welp, permalite said everything I would have said. =)

You should not get bottlenecked with just one 7870, most PC games run quite efficiently and propably even more so cause developers have to start expanding to multiple cores with the rather weak console CPUs, so you should benefit from multiplats.

I got corsair CX500 in my current setup, its been running for little over 2 years without probs. It's a good budgetline PSU.

and yes R9 290x would heavily bottleneck the system, and it costs some +600$ anyways :P

I would say the minimum graphics card upgrade you should go for is the 7850. I don't think a 7790 would be a significant enough upgrade for you to notice the difference.

No No No Nooooooooooooooooo.

Get yourself 7950 please buddy, you can over clock it without voiding warranty and it'll come close to gtx Titan performance all for a measly price tag of £173.

In addition you'll get 3 free games from never settle forever.

7950 over clocked at 1150mhz will be about 3 times the performance of 7790.

http://www.hwcompare.com/13966/geforce-gtx-titan-vs-radeon-hd-7950-3gb/

You see stock 7950 has 80% of Titan bandwidth. You can over clock 800mhz to 1150mhz for about 40% more power.

http://m.novatech.co.uk/products/components/amdradeongraphicscards/amdhd7950series/fx-795a-tdjc.html

You can get saints row 4, tomb raider, far cry 3 etc for free.

For the love of god please don't buy 7790.

Please read my above post buddy, don't want you to be wasting your money. 7950 over clocked can pull well over 3 teraflops compare that to ps4 1.8 teraflops GPU.

Please take a look at this overclocking guide and benchmarks.

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/radeon_hd_7950_overclock_guide,1.html

if you're a gamer 256 bit cards should be the minimum standard. 128 bit is a big no no.

Teraflops... Well. I could go into detail why that's a useless performance metric for games, but I won't bother. :)

Keep in mind, the rest of his system. - It's not exactly cutting edge.
Clock for clock the Phenom 2's were slower than the later model Core 2's, the Athlon 2's are even slower than that and I don't think he has overclocked the processor either.

As for the 7950 specifically, once overclocked it can match Titan in some games, it's still anywhere from 30-70% slower in other games, no amount of overclocking is going to fill that gap unfortunatly, however you shouldn't expect it to, it's also orders of magnitude cheaper.
All in all the 7850/7870 is probably going to be the better fit anyway, spend the money saved on a Corsair Hydro cooler and overclock the CPU or something.
Even then a 7850/7870 should be fine for a few years yet if you are only a 1080P gamer.

Also keep in mind the size restrictions in his case.

Ah yeah rushed out to post, didn't read his posts fully

im not very knowledgable about amd CPU line, is his CPU performance somewhere Along core 2 duo series? If that's the case even 7850 will be bottlenecked while running modern games imo. I could be wrong though. :)

If you check out the prices in UK, 7870 is sitting at around £160 while 7950 is at £170. Imo 7950 just perfectly hits that sweet spot if you're looking at 3-4 years ahead.

ps:Your rig is insane. Can't afford to upgrade anymore as a unversity student sigh.

Since literally everyone is saying "no 7790" I won't get one. I'm glad I asked first

Can someone explain what this Never Settle Forever AMD thing is? It claims to give me two free games, and I can't find any list of the games anywhere. http://www.aria.co.uk/amd/never-settle-forever

Kantor said: Since literally everyone is saying "no 7790" I won't get one. I'm glad I asked first Can someone explain what this Never Settle Forever AMD thing is? It claims to give me two free games, and I can't find any list of the games anywhere. http://www.aria.co.uk/amd/never-settle-forever

http://sites.amd.com/us/promo/never-settle/Pages/nsreloadedforever.aspx

7950 7970 give you a gold tier reward for a choice of 3 games.

7800 series give you a silver tier reward for a choice of 2.

7790 7770 give you 1 choice in bronze tier.

You have to purchase from selected retailers, the retailer will give you the reward code :) Participating retailers are listed if you scroll down. It's the same for US/UK.

They are still adding games, they've hinted battlefield 4 upcoming later possibly in December.

allblue said: Kantor said: Since literally everyone is saying "no 7790" I won't get one. I'm glad I asked first Can someone explain what this Never Settle Forever AMD thing is? It claims to give me two free games, and I can't find any list of the games anywhere. http://www.aria.co.uk/amd/never-settle-forever http://sites.amd.com/us/promo/never-settle/Pages/nsreloadedforever.aspx 7950 7970 give you a gold tier reward for a choice of 3 games. 7800 series give you a silver tier reward for a choice of 2. 7790 7770 give you 1 choice in bronze tier.   You have to purchase from selected retailers, the retailer will give you the reward code :) Participating retailers are listed if you scroll down. It's the same for US/UK. They are still adding games, they've hinted battlefield 4 upcoming later possibly in December.

So I'm looking at silver tier and I am underwhelmed.

There are two 2013 titles on there and one is DLC (Blood Dragon). The others are 2012 or older (and I own all of the good ones from there), and two of them are Dirt games. The only one from that list I would want is DMC, and even then I don't have any great desire to play it.

I remember when trasharmdsister bought his new card, they gave him BioShock Infinite (at launch). Does Nvidia have better deals on these or something?