I'm sitting on an 8120, 670 and Enough money to get a 4770k and a nice mobo or a Gtx 780. The decision seems easy, the 780, right? But this 8120 drags me back on all my games and my 670 is at 680 speeds, so it could kinda power a 5760 display, kinda. I will be getting enough money in october to buy the other option. So teksyndicate the 780 (which means I have to sell my 670 being without a computer for 3 days) or the speed of the 4770k. I am leaning towards the 780.
Note in October when I have the rest of the funds the 9970 will be out which should preform very well as nVidia fired first. I play Skyrim alot and we all the story there with AMD vs Intel performance.
I would go for a 4770k with a good mobo. A 670 is plenty and a 9970 will be very nice. I have played around with laptops sporting a 8970m and they are really something. But if the jump between 7970m and 8970m is to go by, the jump from a 7970 to 9970 will be something amazing. Maybe even compete with a titan.
I am in a similar position, I have a terrible vaio F series. Recovering my old desktop from nz tomorow and bringing it back to aus. (Q9550, GTX 560) Basicly im looking at a new mobo, CPU and GPU. If you want the features of the new z87 platform, get the 4770k. If you look at them and dont really care for them, Just get a 3770k and a good z77 mobo. Put the rest of the money towards a gpu in the future. There is only a 10% difference in most cases between ivy and haswell.
People underestimate the CPU in gaming systems. I know I did with my Q9550, Ended up bottlenecking my GTX 560 in games like Battlefield 3 as the game was too demanding on the cpu aswell.
For me ill be getting the 780 and use my 560 as a physx card, You wont have that option if you get a 9970. I would recomend the same in the future but go for the cpu first. I really recomend it.
The performance increase in using a dedicated physx card in some games will outperform a 9970 easily. Though the 9970 will still be an amazing card, definatly worth looking at.
Yeah from all of the benchmarks I have read the 670 can almost pull it's weight on ultra so I guess I could go down on the graphics a bit, but I do have it posted on Craiglist in The Moines so I'll see what will happen over there. If someone likes it I might act on it.