Upgrade cards or Upgrade cooling

[mjk79]

Hey all,

 

I just signed up so bear with me. I have a small dilemma and I could use some advice and your thoughts. 

 

I'm at a point with my system where I consider it about half way through it's life cycle. In 2012 I had a power supply blow and it fried just about everything except the cpu (Original build in 2010), so at that point I pretty much did a side grade on everything except the grapics cards. (GTX 260 to GTX 550ti) Right now I'm at a point where I'd like some better graphics performance and be able to actually use my SLI, which I can't because the cards have a hard time keeping up with 3 displays. My question is regarding if my current setup should be sufficient to handle some newer graphics cards or if I'd just be wasting money. 

 

Currently I'm running this.

AMD Phenom II x6 1090t processor at 3.21ghz.

Asus Sabertooth 990FX R2.0 Motherboard.

24gb ram

2x GTX 550ti Grapics cards

 

 I'm currently planning a small refresh of my system with these.

1x Samsung 840 EVO 1tb SSD

4x Corsair SP120 fans

1x Antec Kuhler 950 (Upgrade from Arctic Freezer 7 Pro)

 

My main concern is, could my CPU support a current gen graphics card like a GTX 780, or even a Last gen card?

 

If not, should I invest in some aftermarket gpu coolers? 

(looking at about 60 bucks each)

 

My feeling is that my processor is probably fine for some newer card.

I'm not really a novice, I've been building PC's since 2002, but I'd just like some opinions.

 

thanks!

[mjk79]

What's your budget?

 

Hard to say, If it came down to it I could probably swing 800 for 2 cards. (In about a month)