I just overclocked my I5 750 today to 3.6 Ghz (Paired with a 7870XT, 4 gigs of ram) and I was running Battlefield 4 w/ 64 players just fine. Especially with a 970, I'd imagine that Battlefield 4 is an easy task. I don't know about Arma 3 though. I was running the game at 1600x900 with supersampling (The resolution scaling settting in game was on 145%, slightly more pixels to render then 1080p - I'd say that it was a worthy test
) on though, since I have a crappy old monitor. In other words, I think that you should just overclock your CPU (Also because it was so easy to do with an aftermarket cooler on my system, and a Asus P7H55-M motherboard. Those aren't ment for overclocking.) and go ahead and buy a new GPU. I thjnk that it will grant you a boost in performance. Perhaps, when a new CPU series arrives, you'll be able to put them in SLI in a new system, would you buy 2x 970s. One now, and one later on.
[EDIT:]
I completely forgot actual results with my system, so here are some benchmarks of games that I tested today:
Hitman Absolution:
Everything on the highest settings, 8x AA. I figured that the 8x AA would compensate for my resolution, since I plan on upgrading later this month:
Max FPS: 48
Average FPS: 38
min. FPS: 30
Batman Arkham City:
Max FPS: 128
Average FPS: 94
Min FPS: 22
I don't know where the sudden FPS drop came from, I think it just was because of some terrible frame times (It only appeared once though, for less then 1 sec.)
As for Battlefield 4; I was running it with supersampling on 145%, with "High" settings all arround, although ambient occlusion and all forms of AA were disabled. It ran on arround 70 to 80 FPS. It would, on occasion, drop for less then a second to something like 20ish. But once again, I think that that is more due to the connection and frametimes then anything else.
Hope this helped
