Maximum PC

She's done me good for bout four years now. However, I think it's time to put the ol' girl out to pasture. The 8800GT just won't play BF3 as well as I would like. It's a great card, just very dated. I was looking into the GTX480 as a possible replacement, just want to make sure the rest of my rig will not hold it back. Specs are as follows:

Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L
Core 2 Duo E8400
4gb Gskill PC2-8500 (Just ordered an extra 4gb...same exact RAM)
MSI NX8800GT OC
Win7 Home Premium 64bit

As much as I would love to build a whole new rig, I just can't afford it atm. I'm hoping to get a little extra life out of this rig without breaking the bank. Would the GTX480 be a suitable upgrade, or should I be looking elsewhere? Thanks for any help yall can give me.

The GTX 480 is out of my comfort zone in regards to bottlenecking. A GTX 560 should be about as high as you can go. I think. Or the GTX 650/660 (not the Ti version)

Assuming you have the PSU for any upgrade.

An GTX 460 chewed up less power than an 8800GT when I put that upgrade on my last computer. I don't think NVIDIA's midrange cards are that power hungry.

Alright, did some looking around and came to this conclusion. My proc would bottleneck the GTX 480 unless I oc it to round 3.6ghz. I have no problem with that, but would like to avoid it if possible. I came across this link in another thread: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gam ... ,3107.html Looks like the Radeon HD 7770 is right up my alley. The price is definitely right. from what I've read my PCIe 2.0 board wont really hold back the PCIe 3.0 card. I could probably stretch my budget a bit and go with the GTX 560 if needed. So, it comes down to this. Will the HD7770 be a decent upgrade, or should I go with the GTX560? I need to pull out my PS to see what the wattage is. All I know is that it is an Antec Truepower. Not sure of the wattage. Thanks for all the suggestions.