Today my graphic card decided to finally flip me off and kick the bucket SO HORRAY time for a new GPU.

Now the problem is I'm cursed with this crappy AMD Phenom X4 955 Black Edition for a CPU and for my GPU replacement I plan on getting either a R9 280x or a GTX 770. While there is no doubt either of them would would be a vast improvement over my former 6870, from what I've heard Skyrim is more CPU heavy then GPU heavy. As I'm planning on downloading a large amount of ultra high resolution texture mods and maybe even use an ENB mod, I was just wondering whether my CPU might bottleneck my GPU performance and is it really worth getting a very powerful graphic card alone or should I replace my CPU with a better one and get only a slightly better better GPU to accompany that?

Also which of the graphic cards I mentioned do you fellas think is better? To the best of my knowledge the 770 is better in almost every regards except for VRAM and price. Is the one extra GB of VRAM on the 280x relevant?

Oh if you wanted to know, I play on a 1920x1080p monitor and the only thing I really care about is being able to run Skyrim maxed out at a steady framerate along with large graphical mods and replacers.

Ugh, from my experience as a hardware technician, AMD is just not the way to go with processors. Intel a lot more stable over time, but twice the price basically. And don't kill it with the graphs. Don't buy the latest card sheesh. Few advices - take proven hardware not the newest. Lets say im making a PC for skyrim, middle to upper middle class PC is something that will run everything with no problem. I'd go i5-2500k (or third generation if youre gonna kill it with mods), any decent chipset for that CPU (the Zxx ones were good and support Ivy bridge), maybe 8gb RAM (a lot of mods running), and Gigabyte GTX 660 (windforce)

Maybe I was too unspecific ... My answer to your question is Yes, that AMD CPU is relatively dated and could inhibit a powerhouse GPU in some ways. So don't get a killer GPU. Get something like the previous generation (600 series). As for the manufacturer I recommend asus or Gigabyte, asus is pretty standard but IMO i prefer Gigabyte for the superior cooling. In the long run, you'd want to change that CPU to i5. And don't go i7 despite what you might hear, its architecture is not designed for gaming actually but rather for crunching, large scale rendering, audio/video/storage processing etc

I was told once that my Asus m4a88td-v evo/usb3 Motherboard might not support intel CPUs Not sure if that is true...

Its true, just checked. So just don't overkill it with the graphics.