the HD 7770 and 7750 - anybody know what those will be like? i have a nvidia 450GTS in need of upgrading

These are the low profile cards of the 7000 series. I'd rather get a 6950 or a 6970 when/if the price drops, since they are still damn solid and of course perform better than low profile cards. Assuming you have good hardware, a single 6950 will allow you to play a game like Battlefield 3 on ultra (save for 2x AA, since you don't really need more on a 1080p monitor, assuming you have one of these) at a good framerate.

Ah. I do have good hardware, now. i5 2500k, asrock extreme 3 gen 3, 1tb hdd, 1080p viewsonic monitor with 1milisec response rate.

Also wqondering if i should save the 450s and sli them?

Apparently, a single 6950 would even outperform 3 450gts cards on a tri SLI configuration, although that's just what I heard. Could easily be true, considering that having multiple cards on SLI/xfire doesn't actually double/triple/etc the performance. And 6900 series cards are known to have much better scalability, so they're ideal if you plan on xfiring them in the future. Just make sure your mobo is "crossfire-ready" too. *

You might also be wondering if there's a difference between a 1gb 6950 and a 2gb one. There are reports that, at 1920x1080, BF3 (maxed out, ofc) would use more than 1gb vram. This is probably where having a 1.5GB card would've been useful. But actually, I have friends who run the game fine on ultra with a 1gb card (~60fps). Still you'd have to keep in mind there may be games that eat up more vram in the future, and the 2gb version of the 6950 doesn't really cost much more, assuming you'd buy one of these.

* Edit: nvm, forgot your mobo actually supports both.

Ah, ok, Thanks.

Yeah, the ASRock extreme3 gen3 is going to be a beast to use

Do you think i should upgrade my card to a 7000 series amd or wait for whenever 600 series nvidia comes out? For the amd i was spying a 7770 in cfx maybe or a single higher card like a 78xx

I don't really know. I'm more of an AMD fan (even though I have an Intel 2500k CPU like yours ), so I don't know much about nvidia cards, except they're quite expensive here compared to amd cards. I just know the gtx560ti actually has a good price/quality ratio here, whereas the gtx580 is the fastest single gpu card, but the price is maybe too high to justify that. So I wouldn't know which card to recommend when it comes to nvidia, but speaking of amd cards, I'd say either wait for a 7800 series card (perhaps the 1.5gb 7890 card) or buy a 6900 series one. A 7770 wouldn't be THAT much of an improvement, but the price is much lower of course.

I probably will crossfire 2 7970 of 7950 (more likely 7950, 7970 will be to expensive)

I have a GTX 285 from Nvidia for my mac pro tower and honestly, the only upgrade path for me would be if it has 2 gig of mem at least. The other ATI cards on the shelves presently only have 1 gig, yes there are more microprocessors but when companies crank up the memory its usually along with major processor upgrades. Since playing COD4 i have had it crash almost everyday so that one mystifies me being that it is made for mac...Perhaps Lion is at fault for this issue....I wanted to get another 285 and sli it but really, I am the one that needs to improve.