dougdangger

That's like asking if a chair, that withstood Oprah for years, can handle Peter Dinklage.

Yes.  600 watts should also run a 280X and probably a 290.  290X might if it's a "good" 600 watt.  Manufacturers recommend 750.
I have a 450 watt PSU and I would love a 290X but since money it tight, I'm not willing to fork up another $80 for a good PSU.
I have a fetish for reference cards.

Yes.  600 watts should also run a 280X and probably a 290.  290X might if it's a "good" 600 watt.  Manufacturers recommend 750.
I have a 450 watt PSU and I would love a 290X but since money it tight, I'm not willing to fork up another $80 for a good PSU.
I have a fetish for reference cards.

Euro Truck Simulator 2  
 
I finally got this truck and it's fricking awesome.

What are your favorites?
 
I can't wait for a U.S. version of the game.

You NEED a wheel and pedals to fully enjoy this game.  It will suck you in.
 
I swear I fight traffic going to and from work.  When I get home what do I do?
Drive a truck!  It's fricking awesome.

You NEED a wheel and pedals to fully enjoy this game.  It will suck you in.
 
I swear I fight traffic going to and from work.  When I get home what do I do?
Drive a truck!  It's fricking awesome.

AMD cards are power hungry

I never knew watching a man's hair bounce around is so enticing to people.
On the other hand:

Still plays games better than PS3 and 360.

Still plays games better than PS3 and 360.

Unfortunately a lot of AMD users do skimp out on a PSU and not go by what the manufacturer suggests.  I've never heard of anyone with a robust power supply having problems with power hogs like 290x.  Yet so many give you the glassy eye look wondering why their PC is unstable with their gpu with a tdp of 300 watts connected to a 400 watt PSU.

2-3 fps is barely noticeable.
A slight over clock should fix that.  960s can easily oc from 1100mhz stock to 1500mhz easily.

The 380 requires a minimum of 500 watt power supply.  You'll have to buy one if your's don't meet the requirement.
A GTX 970 will run on as little as 400 watts.  So if it were me, I'd rather get the better card and continue to use my current PSU than to buy a weaker card and spend money where I didn't have to in the first place.

Why on earth would you vote for Hillary? She can't even walk.

Your question is interesting and I'm always a pretty big proponent of i3 over Pentium (I had one @ 4.4 GHz and it wasn't that good IMO), but I have never recommended i3s for GTA V. I figured I'd test it out by disabling cores and switching hyperthreading off on my Xeon E3-1231v3, and my simulated i3 was actually pretty damn impressive. Here is what I found with a Xeon E3-1231v3 (similar to an i7-4770 but much cooler running) with a moderately overclocked GTX 970 (1417 MHz).
 
I first tested by disabling two cores and disabling HT to simulate a G3258 at 3.8 GHz, and the results were pretty bad. Near sunset by the strip club it was running mostly 40s with dips into the high 30s, and even occasional drops into the 20s with truly horrible stutters a couple of times when I carjacked someone in the area (I would guess the spinning camera view while entering was the main problem here). It was pretty stuttery and driving wasn't great, mostly high 40s. Sleeping until daytime and then going out in the area around Michael's house the framerate was mostly high 50s whether walking or driving. I got an Infernus and drove it around the highway from south of Michael's house all the way to the Mt Chiliad area by going out the east side of the city and it was much better, with framerates in the high 50s and occasionally low 50s, though it would drop to low 40s when I got to that small town where the highway becomes a regular road. The town right before the Mt Chiliad forest. Overall I felt the game was unplayable in the city, reasonable in the country on my simulated 3.8 GHz Pentium. GPU usage was terrible, 45%-65% most of the time, even on the open road (I ran with vsync off on all tests).
 
So I rebooted, went into the BIOS, and switched hyperthreading on to simulate a 3.8 GHz i3 (the E3-1231v3 has a 3.8 GHz single and dual core turbo that it stays on 100% of the time in demanding single and dual core loads for me). The performance was stellar in GTA V. In that area by the strip club at the same time of day near sunset I was mostly getting 65 fps on foot or in the car, with some drops to the mid 50s in the area. When I drove downtown through the skyscrapers there was an immediately noticeable drop to 54 fps or so, but the stutter with the dual core and no HT was eliminated. I'd get low to mid 70s with drops into the low to mid 60s in the daytime walking and driving by Michael's house. Driving on the highway whether near sunset or in the middle of the day was great, 60s in the city, 70s in the country, and none of those drops in the small town before Mt Chiliad that I saw with the simulated Pentium. I could slap vsync on to 60fps and this i3 could feed my 970 very well, I was really impressed. GPU usage was in the 80s most of the time with very rare drops into the mid 60s. So it does bottleneck my 970 (with my Xeon it's mostly 95% GPU usage or better, with very very rare dips into the high 80s), but not nearly as much as I figured it would. It would be pretty damn good for playing at 60 Hz. Some drops into the 50s, but mostly 60 fps. GTA V is a really well written game.
 
Then I rebooted and went into BIOS and changed my simulated i3 to run at 3.0 GHz to see what effect the clockspeed had. And this test I have to give a big incomplete to. I started out at the same time near sunset by the strip club, and it ran mostly 60s on foot, mid 50s in a car, with drops into the mid 40s. So not as good as my simulated 3.8 GHz i3, definitely not butter smooth like with the simulated 3.8 GHz i3. Still smoother than the 3.8 GHz Pentium equivalent, higher framerates, but not great like the 3.8 GHz i3 equivalent was. Since the i3 that's always on sale for the lowest price (i3-4160) is 3.6 GHz, I think the 3.8 GHz i3 test would be a lot closer to actual results with an i3-4160 or i3-4170. I have to give the test an incomplete though because GTA V crashed on me when I switched the CPU to 3.0 GHz. I have never had GTA V crash on me, so I don't know what the hell happened there. I don't feel like redoing that test though.
 
The big caveat with these tests is an i3-41xx only has 3MB L3 cache while a Xeon E3-1231v3 has 8MB L3 cache. All gaming benchmarks I have ever seen say there is minimal difference in gaming with 3MB vs 6MB vs 8MB L3 cache, but I can't disable X amount of cache to test whether it makes a difference. But the difference between GTA V on the 3.8 GHz simulated Pentium and the 3.8 GHz simulated i3 was absolute night vs day, like the difference between running an HD 7770 vs a GTX 960 in most games. Playing about 15 minutes in dense traffic, cops chasing me, just lots of things going on it was a really smooth gaming experience on the simulated 3.8 GHz i3. 
 
My settings were 1080p, everything maxed out in the standard settings except MSAA and reflection MSAA off, and grass on Very High instead of Ultra. All advanced settings were turned off except for the streaming when flying.
 
To answer your OS question, nah, you don't need to reinstall the OS if you're just switching out the CPU. If you switch out the board you have to, but I never needed to reinstall Windows when I replaced my G3258 with a Xeon E3-1231v3 on the same Gigabyte H81 board.

Gsync, Shadowplay, nvidia gamestream, DSR, geforce experiance optimisations, physx, nvidia gameworks, CUDA, MFAA, Surround, SLI, GPU Boost
 
etc etc
 
 
 
 
(better drivers)

GSync
Shadowplay
Geforce Experience
Nvidia Gamestream
VXGI
MFAA
DSR
VR Direct
SLI
Surround
GPU Boost 2.0
CUDA
Adaptive Vsync
3D Vision
PhysX
 
Those are all of them, I think.
 
The main thing is CUDA, really.

AMD is for poor people, that's why.

The money you're willing to spend brings you to about $240 USD.  For that much money you can go with a 4gb 960.  Not a huge difference from the 2gb model but playing games with high res texture packs or even GTAV, benchmarks have shown up to a 20% fps increase.  I wouldn't bother with either of the AMD.  They really just trade blows with the Nvidia.  But the Nvidia has full DX12 support.
 
If you have a decent internet connection I would put the money you save on an SSD.  A 250gb SSD may seem small, but if you have Steam and a fast internet, just download the game you'll be playing and enjoy the faster rw time.
 
Going Nvidia and SSD and you won't need anything over 400watts.

If AMD can manufacture and sell "disappointment" they'd make a killing.

It highlights the lack of effort on AMD's part.
 
AMD put so much money behind the hype of the Fury and it failed to dethrone even Nvidia's second to the top dog.
 
As for the 370 vs the 750ti, the 370 costs about $160 while the 750ti is $130.  You get nothing free with the 300s at the moment.  You get a $60 Batman game for free with the 750ti.  So you're basically paying $70 for the card.  Besides, the 750ti is for people who want to dip their feet into gaming using their store bought PC, usually with a crappy PSU.  The 370 requires a 450watt unit.
 
Fanboys aren't born overnight.  They are conceived after years of being impressed and satisfied with a product line.  During my time as a PC user, I have swapped teams a few times (red vs green).  However, the past 5 years have been greatly disappointing regarding AMD.  Not just their GPU but CPU as well.  No, I'm not going to buy their product out of pity.  That would be a disservice to myself and the gaming community.
 
Their stocks went down about 7% to a pitiful value of $2.50 per share since the announcement and release of the 3 series.  It also went down another 2% since the debut of the Fury X.
 
So it's not being a fan boy.  It's there's nothing promising on AMD's side.

I've heard so many AMD fans say:
let's see if you still say that when the 7900 is released
let's see if you still say that when the R9 200 is released
let's see if you still say that when the R9 300 is released
let's see if you still say that when the Fury X is released
I'm so tired of waiting.

"At the end of the day, though, a PC graphics card requires a combination of hardware and software in order to perform well—that's especially true for a multi-GPU product. Looks to me like the R9 295 X2 has been let down by its software, and by AMD's apparent (and, if true, bizarre) decision not to optimize for games that don't wear the Gaming Evolved logo in their opening titles. You know, little franchises like Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed. It's possible AMD could fix these problems in time, but one has to ask how long, exactly, owners of the R9 295 X2 should expect to wait for software to unlock the performance of their hardware. Recently, Nvidia has accelerated its practice of having driver updates ready for major games before they launch, after all. That seems like the right way to do it. AMD is evidently a long way from that goal." -TechReport 2014
 
Again AMD being half assed about their products.
 
What's the point of "the most powerful" if it doesn't work right.  You may have the fastest race car but when your driver is shit, you won't win the race.

why get that when you can get a 980ti for the same price as a deal
 
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/productlist.php?catid=1914&groupid=701&sortby=priceAsc&subid=1402

I've heard so many AMD fans say:
let's see if you still say that when the 7900 is released
let's see if you still say that when the R9 200 is released
let's see if you still say that when the R9 300 is released
let's see if you still say that when the Fury X is released
I'm so tired of waiting.