gtx 970 viable for my PC?

[Asylum6]

Looking for help to see if it's worth putting a 970 in my current PC. Specs below:

cpu - AMD FX6300 3.5 - 6 core
board - msi 760 gma p34fx
Ramm - 8 gb 1600mhz
PSU - 400 watts

Also, when i do a search for the 970's, various are listed. Besides manufacturer,price, and size, is there a difference (performance)?

Note: I will be adding a stick of RAMM regardless to my PC and understand I will have to upgrade my PSU to support the 970 addition if I do upgrade, 650 should be enough? Thanks for the help!

 

[glamdringfh]

1) A good 550W PSU would be enough, though at the moment there's a great deal on a 650W PSU if you're in the states:

Power Supply: EVGA SuperNOVA G2 650W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply ($59.99 @ Newegg)
Total: $59.99
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-11-05 08:30 EST-0500

2) The different versions of the GTX 970 are after-market revisions by 3rd party companies. They revolve around better cooling and higher clock rates (faster cards). The Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 G1 is the reigning king, but is also quite expensive. The MSI GTX970 is also a very solid choice. If you can afford it try and get a model with 4GB of VRAM, it will perform quite a lot better over the 2GB version in the long run.

 

[Asylum6]

Based on reply I would assume it "is" worth adding the GPU to my current system then. TY for your reply

 

[nikaldro]

It would be OK, that CPU would bottleneck a 970 only a bit. Considering that your CPU isn't very powerful, overclocking the 970 would be pretty much pointless, thus I'd recommend the cheapest non-reference GTX 970 model you can find.
While 400W are enough to power your rig, I'd upgrade to a bigger and better 550-650W unit.

 

[glamdringfh]

Yes, it would be a good addition.

Your CPU might bottleneck the card a bit on some games, but you'll still be able to enjoy quite a lot of the performance the GTX 970 has to offer. After the PSU and GPU upgrade you'll be able to keep those comonents for quite some time and eventually look to getting a stronger CPU.