SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition 1GB 128-bit GDDR5 crossfire $95 after MIR plus free Far Cry 3 voucher Newegg

Well, I was convinced to go with a 650ti over the 7770
I was waiting for the price to drop under $100

$101.00 is close enough for me !

[URL="http://slickdeals.net/f/5921184-MSI-GeForce-GTX-650-Ti-1GB-128-bit-GDDR5-PCI-Express-3-0-x16-HDCP-Ready-Video-Card-101AR-Newegg?p=58364092&posted=1#post58364092"/URL]

Saw that this morning. Great deal. No free Far Cry though. $101 is the lowest I've seen the 650ti so far. Too bad they won't do SLI, two of them would be a nice set up. I can't do it on my computer but one of my kids friends is building a rig, would be hard to beat $202 for two decent video cards. But no SLI

I have this EXACT same CPU. Brisbane! I actually overclocked the 2.6GHz to 3.1GHz and it's actually can almost hold its own, lol.

Let me copy/paste what I wrote earlier:
"Don't worry about the bottleneck. It's not the CPU bottlenecking the GPU, it's the CPU being a bottleneck to the game itself. Your CPU will not be able to handle the game as well regardless of the video card. A dual core at 3.0 GHz should be enough for most games and there are a few games that are CPU intensive so you don't have to upgrade right away. I think GTA4, and Starcraft2 are some of the CPU intensive games. This is a moot point because we're talking about the 7770, not buying a cpu/mobo/gpu.

I have a old desktop with an AMD X2 5000+ (dual core 2.6GHz OCed to 3.1GHz) with a GTX 560 Ti that can handle most games pretty well. The CPU in this case is worse than yours, and the GTX 560 Ti is about 80-85% better than the 7770 and the doesn't really experience "bottleneck" from most games."

I overclocked the 560 Ti to 940MHz and am getting gains on gaming performance so it's not bottlenecked by the CPU at all.

I couldn't find the exact article that explains this so well, but here's another that I found:
http://www.tomshardware.com/revie...737-7.html
This page shows the performance of Battlefield 2 Bad Company 2, and on the bottom chart, it shows the difference betwen 1, 2, 3 and 4 cores. There is a dropdown menu on the page that tests other games. Some games do matter, and other games do not.

Anyways, you'll be fine with the 7770, and don't worry about gpu bottleneck on a dual core. Most games are designed for dual cores.