Hi Lawlypops, I am not a AMD fan, but there is nothing wrong with your choices. Same as you can run amd gpu with intel cpu. I always have stuck with nvidia and intel, but there are allot of very happy people that have mixed it up. I do see that the ranger does NOT support SLI, so you would not be able to get a secong gpu in the future. If you get a amd gpu you would be able to get crossfireX running in the future. a Radeon R9 280 should be in the same price range with 3GB memory. The platforms will have benefits running the same, so just get a AMD gpu.

An R9-280 is roughly equivalent to a GTX 960 in actual performance - but it's made by AMD, costs less, and uses more power.

I think it would be a better choice because you could later add R9-280 card(s) to run in a CrossFire configuration. If this is your plan, then I advise paying a little more upfront to save yourself a lot more down the line by buying a robust PSU which can handle multiple GPUs.

An AMD GPU also allows the "R7" iGPU in your AMD APU to assist a little in graphic computations instead of just sitting inert. Admittedly, this is a weak contribution and it would bump up the heat output of your processor package, but AMD designed it to work that way anyhow. And not all software (now or upcoming) can support this fancy little AMD technology, so you might want to determine if it applies to any particular games/applications you want to run.

Personally, I would advise an AMD FX-83xx/93xx CPU running on an AM3+/990FX/SB950/DDR3 motherboard. It would cost about the same but give you a wider selection of motherboards to choose from, which offer more compatibility options with existing and upcoming technologies, and more power-user or overclocking toys to play with. The AMD APU parts are designed more for "all in one" sorts of PCs intended for browser and productivity sort of things, basically non-gaming (or perhaps light-gaming) systems which don't require added GPU hardware. Why pay extra to put a junky (and largely unused) GPU into your processor when you can instead buy a plain CPU for less and use that money towards upgraded GPU card(s)?

Newegg has this XFX DD Black Edition R9-280 on sale for $180 - this week only! 1792 stream processors @ 1000MHz (core), 3GB GDDR5 @ 5200MHz, all sorts of XFX add-ons. It would be hard to find anything better in this (R9-270) price range.