To be honest those benchmarks look fishy.

I have not checked out Far Cry 3 benchmarks on the net extensively but for comparison il tell you the performance im getting with my 560ti.

Min FPS: >20FPS

Avg FPS: >30

Max FPS: ~40. (very rarely gets to 40 though)

My FPS never drops below 20 FPS and this is at ultra with 4@ AA.

These are real life performance stats im giving you. Both the 7870 and the 660ti are almost double the performance of a 560ti. Now im not saying you will get double the FPS, obviously not, but i think you will be really pleased with both of those cards. They really are great value. But just keep in mind playing every game at the highest settings @60 FPS is NOT a reasonable expectation on that budget....but you certainly can come close.

Ive also done a fair bit of tweaking with the Far Cry 3 settings and it turns out theres only two settings that really have a major impact on your FPS. Sorry i forgot what they are at the moment, will update later. The point im trying to make is that you can practically run the game with ultra settings with those cards...you just need to tweak one or two settings down, maybe drop AA to 2x instead of 4x. Im pretty sure if you do that you will be at > 30FPS Min.

The other issue i have with Far Cry 3 is that there really isnt much difference to the overall look of the game at the different settings. Theres a few games out there where you can immediately pick up the difference when you drop to lower settings...but Far Cry 3 simply isnt one of those games. It looks good at all settings.

BTW if you want some details on the PC build i recently did then let me know and I'll post the details.

The GTX570 was a placeholder. Dgc is either going for HD7870/660/660Ti. We ruled out the GTX570 as slower and inefficient and lacking VRAM. 

As far as the CPU goes, it's not really fair to compare an FX4100 CPU to an i5 3470/3570/2500K, etc. because each of the Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge cores is actually faster per clock cycle. Right now IVB has more than a 50% advantage in IPC over Bulldozer/Vishera. It wouldn't be surprising to see cases where i5 is up to 50% faster than FX4100 in games and it also explains why i5 2500K / i5 3570K will have no problems outperforming an "8-core" FX8350 in most games.

Even as high as a  70% performance advantage in some modern games.

While the i5 does cost $100 more, it would be short-sighted to consider this expensive in this case since the CPU is going to outlast the GPU by far. Saving $100 now on not getting the i5 means you'd have to upgrade very soon, vs. having the i5 "K" series that can overclock to 4.5ghz and easily last through 2-3 GPU upgrades, if not more.  Of course there will be a lot of games like Far Cry 3 that are primarily GPU limited and FX4100 will do just fine but you can't account for other future games that need more CPU power. Skyrim also responds well to a fast CPU. I think the $100 extra for i5 3570K/2500K is well worth it over the FX4100, or any FX for games since with the Intel CPU you can feel safe that for 3-4 years your CPU will keep up with your future GPU upgrades, especially with a K series as that leaves room for overclocking.

I always welcome more input. The more I know before finally putting the money down, the better. 

NCIXus.com has a great deal on the excellent PC Power & Cooling 750W Silver rated PSU for $70 after rebate and free shipping. This PSU absolutely kills the Ultra in your OP:

http://us.ncix.com/products/?sku=55515&vpn=PPCMK2S750&manufacture=PC%20Power%20%26%20Cooling&promoid=1285

Sweet Jesus.

When I build my awesome, high-budget desktop in a few years I sure as hell hope you're still around here.

Dr. Grass, I'll gladly help you out. You can always message me in my Inbox even if I disappear for some reason. I am thinking of doing my masters soon but hopefully I'll still have enough time to keep up with PC hardware as a hobby. 

Ya, that happens with a lot of games, like Crysis 2. There is a very large penalty on playing FC3 maxed out vs. on very high but the game still looks gorgeous on very high.

Very High - http://static.techspot.com/articles-info/615/bench/1920_02.png

Ultra - http://static.techspot.com/articles-info/615/bench/1920_01.png

Alpha-to-Coverage (A2C) "Enhanced" only works when at least 2xMSAA is turned on. When A2C and MSAA are turned on, the performance hit is 15-20 fps. Also going from SSAO/Shadows on High to HDAO/Shadows on Ultra drops frames about 10 fps. 

The most common settings in modern games that kill performance are MSAA (not FXAA/MLAA/TXAA), Ambient Occlusion (that's your SSAO/HBAO/HDAO) / Shadow settings, Tessellation and Global Illumination. You can gain a lot of performance turning some of these down from Ultra to High or Medium in games to get a lot more performance if needed.

ok thanks,that PSU is bronze tx750 v2-80 plus and cost £85,for someone like me it's a question of shopping around and building it myself which people say is easy but of course i bet there are always problems really with fitting in the case or getting it built for you at the numerous online places

Sweet thanks.

Masters isn't as big of a deal as people want you to believe

Cool thread with great advice. You guys seem to be really knowledgeable with hardware. I just upgrade my own rig last week. Too late to change components but fire away, I'll use your advice for future consideration/tweaks.
- 2GB Sapphire Radeon 7870HD GHZ Edition
- 3.6GHz AMD Quad Core 4100FX Bulldozer CPU
- 750GB HDD (250GB Seagate Barracuda+ 500GB Western Digital Caviar Blue)
- OCZ 600MXSP 600 watt PSU
- Kingston 8GB DDR3 1333MHz Dual Channel RAM
- ASRock 960GM-GS3 FX AM3+ Mobo.

I would second the HD 7950 or the 7870 but I personally suggest the former if you're going this high end. The reason is that the next generation consoles are heavily rumoured to be based on the same architecture as the AMD card and the consoles themselves are rumoured to have a LOT of memory which makes the extra 1GB RAM potentially quite useful.