Simple mobo question.

First post, guys.
So I bought a PC about 6 to 7 months ago with an HIS Radeon 6850 GPU and a MSI A75MA-G55 motherboard(and a tx650 PSU, 16GB RAM, and a quad-core 2.9 processor).
I'm playing on a 24" monitor and 1080p and 1920x1080 resolution, and the 6850 has been working pretty fine and all, but I kind of feel like I should upgrade.
I was looking at the ASUS Radeon 7950 for an upgrade, but it looks like it needs a PCI 3.0 x16 slot.
The MSI A75MA-G55 motherboard appears to say it only has a PCI 2.0 x16 slot.
Does this mean I'll have to upgrade to a new motherboard if I want a substantial GPU upgrade?

>Shameless self-bump.

No you don't need a PCIE 3.0 slot its backwards compatible. With an APU though you won't get full crank out of the card. Your CPU will be holding it back as the AMD APUs basically shunt cache for iGPU which makes the whole operation a bit of a slow pig when you aren't using the igpu. The purpose of the APU is as a low powered system. When you put a high powered discrete card in (it can only Xfire with a low powered card afaik up to 66XX) it is out of its element.

^ full crank lol i dont even think we use full agp power yet, its all marketing sales pitch. yeah it looks good on paper but im almost 100% sure you wont see the performance with your own eyes.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but 8X AGP is the same speed (or close enough) as 8X PCI Express 1.0 right? Having said that we've defiantly hit the point of saturating that kind of bus with video cards, especially if you start to go multi-card with crossfire or SLI.

Theocnoob is right, that's just not a very good processor for what your trying to do with it. To find out run a program like MSI Afterburner and play some games. Then exit out of the game and look at the usage, if the video card is not hitting 100% usage most of the time then your system is being bottlenecked by the processor and a faster video card will do nothing for you. If thats the case I would suggest a processor/motherboard upgrade.