Maximum PC

I've got a little spending money now and was thinking it might be time to upgrade my aging card. I'm not playing the latest and most demanding games, but I've been noticing the need to turn down settings in games has been becoming more common. I'm thinking about an AMD 7770, the prices I've been seeing are in the $110-120 range which is good, but its hard to get a direct comparison of performance with a 4850 vs a 7770 because of the age difference between the two. So I have a few questions:

Will my setup's lack of PCIe 3.0 will bottleneck performance of the 7770, will it not be much of an issue? Has anyone else made a similar upgrade, and did you see a nice boost in performance? Is the 7770 more power efficient than the 4850? Are there better price/performance cards out there?

CURRENT SETUP:
ASUS P5Q Pro LGA 775
Intell Core 2 Duo E8400 3.0GHz
ATi 4850HD 512 MB
4GB DDR2 800
Antec EA650 Watt

I am open to other card suggestions, I have looked at the 6850 for more power (a little more than I want to spend, but not completely out of my range), and the GTX 550 TI. So give me your thoughts.

Thanks

7770 is a nice step up from the 4850, and can hold its own against the 6850 in many games at 'lower' resolutions, and it's better than the 550 Ti in most games. The 6850 starts to show better performance at 1920x1080 & higher resolutions depending on game, and the 550Ti will win out in a tiny handful of games that already favor nVidia chipsets to start with.

PCI Express 3.0 is a non-factor & will be a non-factor for probably 2 more generations of GPU's, after that, it could be a whole new ball-game...

Power wise, the 4850 has a TDP of 110 Watts, the 7770 just 80 Watts, so it's definitely more efficient.

You could go with a nVidia 550Ti for about the same price & about the same performance as the 6850, but with a TDP of 116 Watts. So, price wise, performance wise, power wise, the 7770's a pretty good all-around card until you step up over the $150 mark.

I do run at 1920x1080 and my 4850 does an admirable job for the most part. I usually pick up older games on-sale on steam, but as I've said I'm noticing the need to turn more settings down on 'newer' games as they go on sale. That and as a WoW player I experienced the 15-20 FPS drop that seems to occur every-time they release an expansion .

I did go ahead and purchase the 7770, seemed like a good buy at $110, assuming rebate. I did see some being sold at micro center for $90, but after looking up that particular model seems like gigabyte released a batch with a higher failure rate. Anyways it's good to know I should see a decent performance boost, plus I'll get access to DX-11 and all the eye-candy that entails. I'll post my impressions once I receive and install the card.

Thanks for your input.

Benchmark Chart:

http://www.hwcompare.com/11972/radeon-h ... n-hd-7770/

Nasty

The card came yesterday and I got it installed. So far I'm seeing good increases in frames about 15-20 increase in WoW, TF2 and Dues Ex: HR run smoothly now. It does seem to run a bit cooler ~48c at load and ~35c regular use (i.e. web/productivity stuff). I would have run some comparison benchmarks but it was either spend all night running benches or spend all night playing games, guess which choice won out .

Overall I'd say its a good step-up, I was hoping for maybe a little more of a difference so I could run everything with at full detail without stuttering, but the amount of detail I have to turn down now to run steadily over 32 FPS is more or less unnoticeable. Maybe I'll run some benches this weekend when I have more time. Thanks all!!

Been pretty happy with a [url=http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102958&name=Desktop-Graphics-Cards]Sapphire HD6760[url] so I imagine the 6770 will give you a nice life with that purchase.