Planning on upgrading my multi-purposed pc, need your help!

[Dfost35]

First off, I was planning on buying a PS4 when it comes out but I just decided to save my money and upgrade my PC since I spent more time playing games on it (especially now with Steam's big picture feature).

Here are my current specs running windows 7 atm:
Asus AMD 870 SATA motherboard
8GB DDR3
AMD Phenom 2 3.6 GHz Quad-Core
Sapphire Radeon 6870- DDR5 graphics card
1 TB 7200 RPM Hard drive
550W power supply

I have around 600-700 dollars to upgrade my pc. My question is simple. If I upgrade my graphics card, will the rest of my computer be able to handle it? Also, if not, what would you all recommend me buying with a new graphics card to complement it?

What graphics card can I get around that price range that can be considered "next-gen"?

Thanks for your help and responses in advance!

 

[hang-the-9]

I would wait a bit to upgrade, are you actually having issues with certain games? The video card is pretty good and so is the CPU, although you can get some improvements and can run at higher settings, is the money you spend worth playing on Very High instead of High and getting 60 fps instead of 40?

You could get a Intel Core i5-3570K, new motherboard and an nVidia 760, that would be about $500.

Your existing RAM, drive and power supply should be OK to run those.