I would look for a 7850 or 660. Both of those will be ideal for a bit of light or even heavy gaming. The I3 could be a bottleneck but not something worth worrying too much over.

 

I'd recommend either a 7790 or a 650ti maximum with that cpu as any higher will be a bottleneck. I've seen a 7850 get bottlenecked in sleeping dogs which is a gpu limited game with an i3 sandy bridge processor overclocked.

 

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-fx-pentium-apu-benchmark,3120.html

Worth a read to see what a bottleneck is and how it works. Some interesting results.

 

Worth a read to see how a faster i3 with HT bottlenecked a 7850 in several games.

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18497496

Just be aware OP that if you do get a 7850 or equal gpu it will never get used to its full potential in games as the person linked above was getting bottlenecked with an i3 3220 and that had hyper threading enabled giving it an extra 2 threads over your cpu. In games which benefit from more than 2 physical cores you won't be stressing your gpu much imo.

 

The biggest gain will from a new gpu and for your price range The 650ti boost 2gb version is what to get.

YOUR BASKET
1 x Gainward GeForce GTX 650Ti Boost Golden Sample 2048MB GDDR5
PCI-Express Graphics Card £137.99
Total : £148.79 (includes shipping : £9.00).


Best Graphics Cards For The Money: April 2013


http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/gaming-graphics-card-review,review-32671.html

 

+1

The 650ti is a bit faster than a 7790 but either card will suit your processor well.

 

Get the 650ti boost Reading the link i posted should clarify that.

 

If you do plan to upgrade your cpu then a 7850 or 660 will be a fine choice but an i3 will definitely hold those cards back in the majority of todays games. Otherwise the 650ti looks the best buy for your system.

 

I would

YOUR BASKET
1 x Gainward GeForce GTX 650Ti Boost Golden Sample 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £137.99
1 x Arctic Silver Céramique 2 Thermal Paste (2.7g) £2.99
Total : £151.78 (includes shipping : £9.00).

 

It will never get used to its full potential is very wrong. There isn't that many games that use all the cores and it is only of late that game devs have started to use more CPU cores. In some instances it will be a bottleneck but in the biggest majority of games, it will not hinder it at all.

Take this Assassins Creed 3 bench results with a 690 and various chips.



As you can see, a GTX 690 (a £900 GPU) is being held back by 10 fps on the minimum. I would happily use an I3 with either a 7850 or a 660 and not worry about the odd 1 or 2 fps in the very rare games.

I do wish people wouldn't scaremonger and blow things massively out of spec so much

 

Not sure what planet you live on Greg.

Spoiler

Up to you OP but i think id go the advice Mickey and myself offered.

 

personally i would get a second hand i5 2500k for 100 quid and sell you cpu and put that money to the other 50 quid and get a second hand ati 6950 or 560 ti

alot better all round.

 

What power supply do you have?

From your description its not definitive that the problem is your graphics card (even though its most likely).

You may also need a new PSU for the GPUs being suggested so worth factoring that cost in.

 

I think you guys have picked the wrong card to compare on those platforms. The GTX 690 is the only high end Nvidia card that will run PCIe 3.0 out of the box on X79 which does tend to skew the results. The 2600k, 2700k and 3770k are better CPUs to game on than anything on X79. I would be a little concerned if someone produced a graph showing a HD 7970 or Titan running better on X79 than the other setups.

 

A 7850 isn't going to bottleneck anywhere near like a 690. Not sure what you are out to prove but telling the OP to only get a max of a 650TI or a 7790 is poor advice.

Ohhh and Tomb Raider on a I3 2100 with a 7970 looks fine to me.

 

There is something very strange about those graphs, the 3930k and 2600k are both basically sandy bridge. The difference is the 2600k is clocked higher and has a slightly more efficient performance per core. So the question is why is the 2600k getting beat by the 3930k. Have the reviewers got their test rigs setup fairly and correctly.