Sorry for the mixed up subject title. I'll be as brief as possible.

Tried to play BF4 on the youngies 5 year old gaming PC - its a 2 core duo E8400, 8GB ram and a HD4900 series card.   Installed well but just about melted everything when trying to play. Never heard it make noises like that before !  I'll use the guts of this machine as a trial HTPC...

Then installed BF4 on my gaming machine - A 2 year old. I5, 16GB ram and a GTX560TI .  It runs well at about 49 FPS but the GPU useage is 98% for even low settings and the temp moves between 85 and 92c. The game is very playable and looks pretty good but the fan is going full pelt and sounds like a hovercraft so I reckon life expectancy of that card with BF4 isn't great.

So the questions to the experts or more expert than me :)

1. IF i swapped out the 560ti in my machine for a newer GFX card so that it handles BF4 and is reasonably future proofed for next couple of years, what card would you recommend. Given it's an I5 3.3Ghz I'm hoping that main board and processor are good enough for now. 

2. What build would you go with for primarily gaming, watching movies and encoding using handbrake etc.  I'll sort the monitor, keyboard, OS  etc. Just the box with the costly stuff inside would be great. I don't particularly want to spend $1200 on a GFX card and would like to balance $$ versus value.


$$$ for 1 - Upto around $350/$400

$$$ for 2 - Upto $3000 but would be nicer at $2500 ish

Thanks for your thoughts.