I need to know if my cpu can handle a sapphire RADEON HD 7970 dual x because the crappy DELL AMD RADEON R7 450 4GB is runs hot so and I'm going to need to buy a bigger psu my set up is a 500watt psu 16gb 1600mhz g.skill ripjaws x series amd fx 8370 with AMD rgb wraith cooler I don't know the DVD drive but a Seagate HDD 500gb GIGABYTE 970a -DS3P FX MOBO and of course the crappy gpu or the other alternative GIGABYTE GEFORCE GTX 1050ti OC
Sometimes dells use decent PSUs like delta, might post a screenshot of the power table. Go for a 1050ti, faster and a dozen times more power efficient; plus it will have better driver support. 7970 is basically EoL
GCN 1.0 is a power hog, hot, and slow by today's standards. You can expect driver support to end at any time by AMD's track record.
Yes, AMD can stop supporting GCN at any moment since they have now NCU instead of CU. But that would mean cutting anything except last iteration. I think you are confusing technology generations. AMD has single and slowly evolving architecture spanning from Tahiti(HD7970) till Polaris. Then we got NCU which is not revolution, more like another small evolution. In same time nV had GTX 6xx till GTX 10x0... And several different architectures where they have proven that "forgetting" to add improvement to driver pathway for older ones may make newer ones look much better. It is nV who has very separate generations, not AMD. And AMD has no objective reasons to throw 95% of GPUs out there to trash as it would be PR nightmare.
My Bro still has my R 280X Black by XFX 1050/1575 1.180v ~220tW | 60 deg. cels. He can even Play Forza7 (DX12 or VLK only cuz' he has PhenomII 960 4core, on November he's planing to get ZEN 6/12 ) But, it's old that's the fact. 1080 Led Freesync + GCN 1.1 and you'll end up in just good gaming experience on High/Medium in almost any game. Edit. best bang for buck today will be get some 390X or Fury HBM at ~150-200€
7970 / 280X is GCN 1.0 and does not support FreeSync for anything but video playback, and probably only in fullscreen and not in browser.