Possible video card upgrade. Opinions?

The Q6600 is still a very good, fast processor. I doubt it will bottleneck a 6970. I upgraded the card on my friends computer who's running a Q6600 to a nvidia 470GTX and he gets fantastic FPS on any game he throws at it. (point being the 470 is nicer than the 6970 so you should be just fine)

Also, I'm gaming at 1900x1200 and the motherboard is a GA-EP45-UD3P

A HD 6970 will cost 370$, so you're out of that option.
You can get a HD 6850 or a GTX 460 1GB at that price.They perform the same and either of them will be a good upgrade for you.

thanks for the reply. so you're saying the gtx 470 is faster than the 6970? (sorry, haven't kept up to date on newer hardware)
what about the gtx 570?

Forgot to mention I don't expect the $200 gift card to cover the full cost of the card. I'm just going to put it towards the final price of whatever I decide to get.

You have 200$ to spend, why are you considering cards that cost well over 200$?

I am going to use money I have to pay the difference...

Sorry, I should have made that more clear

You can get a HD 6950 for 300$, which should be good enough at that resolution. Or you could wait for the end of this month and see how the GTX 560 performs.

470 is NOT better nor nicer than 6970. 570 is about equal with 6970. 470 is about equal with 6870, not 6970. I suggest you to buy a 6950, which is 70 dollars cheaper and it can be unlocked to a 6970 very easily with a program.

http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/overclocking/vidcar...

This is the guide on how to do that.

Your CPU will not bottleneck the card. Well, there is always a part in a computer which is bottlenecking it, but that doesn't mean the performance of your computer is not great.

I also recommend you to get a 80+ GB SSD as your OS, programs and games drive instead of a graphics card. 4870 is still a good card, isn't it?

Thanks. Would you chose a GTX 570 over the 6950? This is going to be the first upgrade I've ever done and I can't upgrade often so I'd really like to get the absolute best for my money. Just to make things clear, I'd be willing to spend $400 max. $200 gift card + 200 of my money. Less would be better though, but if it's worth the extra $ I really don't mind.
I just want to make sure that my CPU doesn't bottleneck the card.

Thank you for the information. I have been interested in an SSD for a while now, but I'm still very unsure about them. I know they are blazing fast and all, but for the amount of space you get for the price I really don't know. I could only fit a few games on one... I'm not TOO concerned about OS boot speed and game load times TBH. I feel like the boot/load time on my caviar black is acceptable.

Well then, I would get a GTX 570 instead of HD 6950-70. It's just my preference. If your monitor resolution is 2560*1600 than go with 6950-70. If lower, I would go with 570, but that doesn't mean 6950-70 is bad at lower resolutions. It's just better at 2560*1600 and higher than a 570 (because of 2GB of RAM vs 1.28GB)