The random FPS drops in games like skyrim, BF3 etc. I've a 7770 and pentium g860 (8gb ram). Is it the cpu bottlenecking?
I think your cpu is holding your system back personally, the cpu being only a dual core is really limiting it to newer games as one you are playing. so upgrade to something like a i5 3570k wouldn't hurt and should bring i noticeable performance boost to your gaming. Your looking at roughly $200 to upgrade to the i5 though. But if price isn't a big issue just go for the i7 3770k which is roughly $320. Hope this helps!
or just take the other way out and upgrade to a 6-core or so from AMD, only $120 normally for processor and can get a nice motherboard for like $90 - $100 on a nice day.
or go above that and get an 8-core, but AMD is pretty good in terms of price, but if price no issue go with Casdune suggestion
I think your system is reasonably balanced. I mean, it is good enough for gaming.
However, games like Skyrim are quite CPU intensive. While a 7770 won't struggle to run most games on medium 1080p, your CPU will cause FPS drops in CPU intensive games.
Depending on which motherboard you possess (Intel motherboard), the cheapest upgrade might be a non-overclocking i5. Alternately, an FX6300 and 970 motherboard would be quite cheap.
The CPU is most certainly not the issue, what settings are you playing at and do you have the latest drivers installed?
Does this happen in other games? Skyrim and BF3 are known to be CPU intensive. Also what settings are you running at? Have you tried lowering them? Do you have VSync on, if so have you tried taking it of or turning it on? More details please.
Yes the latest drivers are installed, it must be the cpu and the fact that i play a lot of cpu intensive games. I'm going to upgrade the system very soon. I only recently moved to pc gaming earlier this year and this was the only issue that had me second guessing about moving from console to pc. I never had this problem with console but i believe that this was the case that console downscaled to 720p and of course not as graphically intensive. I will be happy leaving this discussion knowing that you guys with the higher end systems and newer generation of graphics cards that these fps drops happen very rarely...?