I've had some surprising mileage out of my Radeon HD 5870 but now I feel it's time for an upgrade. While I was astounded that Bioshock Infinite was perfectly playable at full settings at my native resolution of 2048 x 1152, I see noticeable slowdown playing Arkham City and the card gets very loud when the action is intense in most current games now. My core components are an Asus P8 Z68-V LX motherboard with an Intel Core i5-2500K 3.30GHz CPU and 8GB (2x4GB) of Corsair XMS3 RAM. I've had my eye on the MSI GeForce GTX 760 Twin Frozr 2GB card as recommended by Custom PC as of issue 121 last month. The only thing stopping me from buying it right now is that it's a PCI 3.0 card and while my board is PCI 3.0-ready, it does say that for full PCI 3.0 compatibility I need to have a 22nm CPU - my i5-2500K is a 32nm chip. 2 questions... 1: Will my CPU cause any detriment to the card I mentioned? 2: If so, any recommendations for the best possible card. I'm looking at £220 as that's how much the 760 Twin Frozr 2GB is, but am flexible by around £30 up or down.
I'd look into the 7970 deals knocking around to be honest. Won't get a more powerful you for the money
To answer your first question, no there will be no detriment. The GPU doesn't even saturate the bandwidth of a x16 2.0 slot, let alone 3.0 so you have nothing to worry about. As for number 2, you could get a 7970 or 680 for £240. However, wait until AMD releases their next gen cards. I think they announce them next week.
I think your CPU would be fine.. And overclock it if you haven't already. Most 2500k can get to 4.4 ghz with not much trouble. I would go for a 7970, plenty of deals, but then again the new amd cards are out in a couple of weeks so it maybe worth to wait to see what will be on offer
