What would be the best video card I could put into this (old Asus) motherboard?

[Stormbow]

In 2011, I built what I consider one of the best rigs I've probably ever built. My Nvidia GTX 570 was (at that time) listed here on Tom's as the 2nd best video card of the year. But, I've never like the GTX 570 because it always ran extremely hot, and extremely loud. (I'm blaming almost all of that on my bad case and cable management skills-- if they can even be called skills...) I even replaced the single fan with this cooler, to no benefit I could recognize.

Unfortunately, this rig just refuses to die (so a new rig is not a possibility), and my favorite game (RIFT) seems to be well beyond my (old) rig because I can't get from one side of the capital city (Sanctum/Meridian, Tempest Bay) to the other without an automatic, forced reload, and trying to move even 3-40 steps in the new capital (Draumheim) causes the same automatic reloading.

So, I'm wondering if I can get a better graphics card into this Asus motherboard. Maybe a better processor than I'm currently using?.

For reference, here are the system requirements claimed by Trion/RIFT, and I've got 16 GB of RAM in this rig (which isn't enough to RAMDrive the game of 20+ GB either).

And many, many thanks in advance for taking a look at my junk to see if there's anything I can do to up my game.

 

[ak47jar3d]

The best card I can recommend for that processor is the gtx 960. I had a build with similar specs (x6 1045t to be exact) and your processor should be just good enough to keep up. Other good cards include cheaper r9 270x and r7 265.

 

[caj]

Nvidia 750ti or even 760
Amd perhaps a 7850, r7 265, or max i would say 7870, r9 285

 

[Stormbow]

The best card I can recommend for that processor is the gtx 960. I had a build with similar specs (x6 1045t to be exact) and your processor should be just good enough to keep up. Other good cards include cheaper r9 270x and r7 265.

Nvidia 750ti or even 760
Amd perhaps a 7850, r7 265, or max i would say 7870, r9 285

Are those PCI-E 3.0 cards going to fit properly and function correctly in the PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot(s) of my motherboard?

 

[Stormbow]

Ok, I found this:
http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2105259/pci-slot-pci-graphics-card.html

So they're more than likely backward compatible, I'll just be taking a performance hit.

Thanks guys!