Upgrading a 470?

I've been modeling some new builds (Ivy Bridge), and have pretty much everything figured out. I had planned to keep my 470 for a while longer, but Skyrim with a ton of mods has my FPS sagging a bit (25-40fps maxed settings). I can easily use the 470 in my HTPC. I guess what I'm asking is to justify a new one--I've never spent $400 on a GPU and I cringe at the thought.

I don't really keep up with the GPU's until I need one. I figured 1.2GB of video ram would be enough for a while. NOPE. So, help me determine "real world" performance. What line of GPU's will significantly increase my performance while spending the least amount of money? I will consider AMD or nVidia, maybe CF or SLI. Or, would my 470 card work for a while longer given the 'rest of the system' upgrade?

Oh, I don't have a budget limit, but I'm a tight-wad by nature.

You should stick with the 470 for a bit longer...try getting this program and locking Skyrim's priority to "realtime". Also, if you still launch Skyrim from steam, add +fullproc" to the launch options. Doing the first got me ~5-10 fps everywhere.

ALSO, if you suffer from the pause-lag (1-5 second pauses), and you have a second internal hard drive, try moving your steam directory to the second drive (this will reduce the pauses by ~70.%).

I would think if Skyrim is your main game, than a gtx 470 should be fine for a while. The game uses quite a bit of CPU power, so going to Ivy Bridge might very well net you a good increase in performance