Upgrade I7 970??

[Ticonderoga]

Hi Guys

I am currently rocking this system :
I7 970 stock
Asus Rampage III Extreme
12 Gb Corsair Vengeance
Evga G2 750 w psu
2 x SSD + 1 HDD
XFX R9 280X DD Edition

I am planing on upgrading my graphicscard when the Price drops for the R9 Nano take effect. But the question is if my I7 970 will bottleneck an R9 Nano Card??
The mobo is the old x58 chipset so I don't have pci Express 3.0.
I game at 1080p and play all sorts of different games from bf 3 to dota 2

What do you guy think?
Cheers

 

[Ticonderoga]

It can run at 4 ghz. It has done so in the past.
But will that be enough for the r9 Nano?

Otherwise I would upgrade to Skylake, but that would mean new mobo and new memory as well

 

[Ticonderoga]

I will bump it to 4 Ghz then and keep the system for as long as I can

 

[Ticonderoga]

Is there any way I can measure if my cpu is bottlenecking the gpu?

 

[Ticonderoga]

XEON it up !!

I am sorry, but I am going to need more info than that?

 

[Ticonderoga]

You should be fine even at stock

I can see you have the same cpu.
Can it keep your gtx980 ti sli fed?

 

[Ticonderoga]

One last question.. what kind of performance loss is there from pci 2.0 x16 - x8?
I have a fairly compact case and when I first put this system together I had an old corsair H80i that I installed. The problem is that the radiator Blocks the use of my first pci Express x 16 port.
Is it worth buying a high end air cooler instead to unblock the slot so the R9 Nano can run at x16 speed instead?