Can I crossfire 2x HD 6870 with this system?

Yes,your board supports Crossfire so you can use 2 6870s on it.

didn't know if i had a good enough psu for it though

It's more than enough for 2 6870s,don't worry  

You will need to oc the e8500 or it will severely bottleneck the 2 6870s.At 4ghz it should be ok but youu would be much better with quad core like a q6600 or a q9650.

I dont know about the 2 cards but im pretty sure that ur 2GB of RAM might bottleneck ur GPU 's (if u get them) !

Yes,I forgot about the RAM,definitely upgrade to 4GB.

I think you should look into just waiting imo. Wait for SB to come out and cayman and just see how the prices are. Then just upgrade all at once. Most "top" performing cards like the 6870 CF will bottleneck cpu's of older age. Of course correct me if I'm wrong. Umm another thing is, if you don't have money to do the full upgrade (but judging from the card choice and how many of the cards you do seem to have alot of money in the budget) is to upgrade to the Q6600 or the Q9550 like BeCoolBro said.

I have 4 gigs. Thats 2x 2 1 gig sticks. Also I should go with upgrading my CPU rather then a graphics card? Have a HD 4870 1gig which does pretty good for the most part. Huge gamer and I have heard quads are not really important for gaming still at the moment

well looking around at some forums with people talking about the quads in games i guess it really couldn't hurt to get the quad anyways. Guess I could do the quad and 1 card for now then.

True - a dual core with hyperthreading will do nicely for the next three years.

You don't hafta get the cpu now you should save up and wait for SB or BD you'll get a better chip for less (if they plan to go with a mid-range pricing) those come out next year. That or just upgrade to a Q6600 that should last you a while.

Upgrading the VGA will give you more boost in performance because almost all games are GPU limited.

^ True but, if he plans to play certain games. IE Black Ops a quad core would help as well, from my knowledge, BO favors quads as dual cores tend to lag because of the dual-cores inability to multi-task while running BO.

Yes,in some games(like BO that you mentioned or GTA IV,WIC,FSX Etc.) a quad core will help.
But in "most" games,the effect of an additional VGA is more than upgrading CPU.

^ True, he should just upgrade them all at once  

hahaha k. Maybe I should just wait it out a little more then. System does pretty good as it is. Just had some of the cash now so was thinking about upgrading the gpu. Drawing a brain fart but refresh me by what you mean by VGA? Isn't that a video output?

Well what VGA I always thought of it as the actually card. But you could think of it as the video output. The VGA though can also mean the actual card.

That's what I thought. Guess I took that as something else when I skimmed through on my phone while I was at work  

Yep,I should start to use "GPU" instead of "VGA" when I'm talking about graphic cards  

i'm not sure if I much insight but i would definitley upgrade the ram and probably upgrade the cpu to like i5 a least to avoid bottlenecks

that would be nice... but my motherboard doesn't support the new cpus so I would be redoing the whole system pretty much if I wanted to do that. But on another note I would be "holding back" some of the system if I were to say... I dunno get a 5970? Would I not be seeing it's full potential?

Yes, you'd bottleneck it ALOT. I would suggest if you were going to get such a highend card, to wait for Cayman and get that when it comes out. The 5970 is a pretty long card too so you should check your case dimensions first if you do decide to get a 5970.

Thanks for all the input you guys been very helpful. If I waited it out another month (hopefully) for the Cayman wouldn't I just bottleneck that as well? Here are the specs for my mobo

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

So what I'm getting is that I should at some point or instead of a graphics card for right now upgrade my CPU and that should open the bottleneck some?

That is correct, I suggest you wait a little longer btw. SB is coming out soon and the i5 SB should prove to stay at the i5 750 pricing of 200$ plus It'll be a great upgrade. Then you should upgrade to the Cayman. Or that's just me.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3871/the-sandy-bridge-pre...

Those are really nice... but my mobo only supports socket 775 though. Didn't want to rebuild the entire computer. This 1 has done well for about 3 years now and I can still handle everything ok... not BLEEDING spectacular but just fine. If I'm at a bottleneck then I'll be just content with this for a couple more years then.

The best upgrade then would be just to get the Q6600, it's the most cost efficient if you stay on the 775 socket.

Ok still be a month or 2 off before I do this but thought I would just go ahead and replace parts in my computer. Let me know what you think.

ASRock P55 Extreme LGA 1156 Intel P55 ATX Intel Motherboard

Intel Core i7-870 Lynnfield 2.93GHz 8MB L3 Cache LGA 1156 95W Quad-Core Processor

CORSAIR XMS3 8GB (4 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)

though that is just a rough idea since I will be waiting another month or so I'll have to see how these SB's price and do in reviews.

An i5 750 would do just fine, save yourself like 80$. The 750 is all anyone really needs for standard use, as for memory. I would think that 4 gigs is good enough but if you can get those XMS3's cheap then sure.