Can my rig handle blender?

So ive been watching a bunch of blender tutorial videos and decided to give it a try and want to download it sometime soon when I have ample time to play around and do cool stuff with it. I know rendering is a hog when it comes to hardware and I do not want to risk melting my computer for something silly i just want to play around with. So do you think my rig is ok? or am I overthinking? Specs are as follows:

CPU: Intel i5-2310 @2.9ghz

Ram: 8gigs

GPU: Radeon HD 7770

PSU: 650w

mobo: ASRock z77 extreme 4.

I plan to upgrade my pc anyways for game after I graduate and find a job with some serious pay but for now any advice is always appreciated!

For the sort of stuff you're going to be doing while learning, your rig will be more than sufficient.

If you have any doubts though, it's free software. Just go download it and load a few meshes and scenes that other people have already done.

Yeah it costs nothing to try.

In my experience Blender isn't as optimized as say, zbrush, but partly that's up to you as well. Multiple your polys into the millions and figure out when your system starts to chug.

You should give Modo and MayaLT a try.

What do you want to do primarily? Hard-surface modeling or more organic stuff?

I'm not looking to do tooo much. Create some nice scenes or landscapes. Try some arhcitecture or maybe try to create some cool scenes from video game characters. One thing I know I want to do is make a short/ simple logo animation. Its just something to play with and i know blender is free. Havent checked many other sources but Im not looking to pay for something that I may not like.

I think so considering I made a rather hefty Blender Game with the engine on a G620 (dual 2.6 gHz) with 4 gigs of slow-ass ram and an Nvidia 8600 GT. You can download it here, but it only works on Windows 7, 64 bit installs. Blender Game Engine kind of sucks.

Blender also prefers Nvidia cards. CUDA and some shit, I'm not entirely sure. It works with Radeon cards, just a bit slower apparently.

It's free software. Seems like there's an easy, definitive way to solve this problem without relying on forums to tell you, "Uh, maybe?"

Yeah, it will for sure. I have used it and your rig is similar to mine.