New card for an old system

[kwhitejr]

Planning to build a new rig next summer, but would like to invest in a new card sooner (this holiday season) to enjoy some games over break. My question, essentially, is whether this is even worthwhile because my other system specs may bottleneck any potential gains.

I built my current rig in 2009:
MOBO: GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3P LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX Intel
GPU: SAPPHIRE 100258-1GHDMI Radeon HD 4850 1GB 256-bit GDDR3 (to be replaced in a month or so)
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E7400 Wolfdale 2.8GHz LGA 775 65W
Memory: 8GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500)
PSU: CORSAIR Enthusiast Series CMPSU-650TX 650W ATX12V (planning to keep this for the new rig)

Presently I'm looking at HD Radeon 7850 or 7870, especially if 7870 goes sub-$200 over the holidays (I like AMD cards in general). Current motherboard only has PCI 2.0, but I've heard that PCI 3.0 cards are backwards-compatible with some performance loss. Any thoughts welcome. Thanks

 

[swifty_morgan]

buy the biggest card now to carry over to your next build........... it will work fine, don't worry about the pci-e 1-2-3 stuff.

 

[kiwing82]

Get the 7870 especially if you will be gaming on 1080p! I was also in your spot a couple of months ago and decided to get the 7870. Luckily it was on sale when I bought it But if your tight on the budget you can't go wrong with the 7850.