I5 750@ 4ghz enough for 7970?

More than likely. A 7970 has about the same performance as a 590 which is a GTX 570 SLI. I think a sandy bridge i5 2500k at 4GHz would be safe. I don't know. Maybe. Only real life testing will show and if you do have a bottleneck, it shouldn't be bad. Maybe a few fps here and there. i5 760 is still a decent cpu.

It should be fine.

Remember that you are talking about gaming here. A 4GHz i5 750 might not keep up with the newest CPUs at heavy CPU tasks, but for gaming you should be more then fine. Even at less then 4GHz. You just need something strong enough to drive the GPU. There will always be a few games here and there that will cause a slower CPU some grief, but for nearly all of the games out there you should be fine.

Not tangibly even a Athalon x4 645 would not tangibly hurt gameplay on a 7970 and i5 750 is a bit better than an Athalon so your all good rest assured for a perfect gameplay that 7970 will enable any good modern Quad core will be fine really . http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon-hd-7970-cpu-scalin...

Everything I stated should be considered relevant towards if your monitor is 60hz if you are after 120hz performance a better CPU will get you closer to that mark albeit even a 7970 will not attain 120fps min in some games.

You could just quit fondling it and install it to answer any of your questions.....

Thanks for the link gordon. As I said there will be games here and there that cause a CPU some grief, it was surprising to me to see even the Athlon x4 not dip below 60FPS to much. OC that CPU and you shouldn't have issues with even that CPU. And the 750 is better by leaps and bounds.

Curious as to how much of an improvement the PCI-E 3.0 will have over 2.1.I'm hearing that it's not even worth it to upgrade to a PCI-E 3.0 mobo.

Pretty much correct. I haven't seen anything yet that shows PCIe 3.0 is worth it. Maybe in time...

In the games that the Athalon 645 was under 60fps so was the i7 2600K under 60fps in short CPUs are over rated as the be all and ens all of a great gaming experience IMHO and experience and there many documents to back up my claims.Online Games with lots of units benefit from higher powered CPUs RTS games as well but most games dont really give a care what CPU as long as its quad and half decent.

Thank you all for your input; I will stay with my i5 750 until something really exciting comes out at a reasonable price (because, as I understand, there is little difference between a $1000 and $200 CPU)

Thank you again

When it comes to gaming,generally no.

The only time I've seen my CPU get bottlenecked is in world of warcraft in 25 man raids while recording data and crap loads of stuff is on screen, but to be honest any CPU struggles there, for normal games you'll be cool.

Hey joe,how are you liking that 7970?

I only just got it yesterday and I'm in work at the moment so I only had a chance to play some wow and that was it!!   Hoping to try out some crysis 2 and metro 2033 later on.

What card did you have before?