Should I upgrade my motherboard next, or something else?

You both mention recording cards. Are you referring to capture cards or something different? I've never used a capture card before, but can only assume they attach to your video output and have their own storage?

The way I see it, I have 3 options:

1) Upgrade my motherboard. Whilst this offers no immediate benefits, It allows me to get past my current bottleneck and allows for additional RAM, crossfire compatibility, etc. And I may as well upgrade to a bulldozer CPU whilst I'm at it, which, I hope, would reduce my rendering times. Overall, This isn't gonna be too useful at this moment in time, but whilst I have the money, it's a good option rather than waiting until I need to upgrade something, and dont have the money to because I never invested in the MoBo.

2) Buy a SSD. When I record in fraps, I see a major performance drop. For example, minecraft fps for me is stable at around 180fps on full settings. I start fraps up without limiting it, and it drops right down to about 40fps. I can only assume this is because of a slow write speed on my HDD, and lack of memory also. A ~500GB SSD would cost me around £300, so it's quite the investment for me, though I imagine it may speed up gameplay a little, and should allow fraps to record without such a massive hit to performance.

3) These recording cards. They won't give me any boost in performance I don't believe, and are reliant upon my current setup, correct? If I buy one of these, it allows me to immediately start recording gameplay with very little reduction - if any - to my gaming experience. Downside: No added benefits from the investment, not sure what I'm looking at, or how they are set up, not sure if they'll record my mic. They don't seem overly expensive however, and because they're reliant upon my current system, I guess they're a 1-time-purchase; no need to keep upgrading them?

If you guys were in my situation; looking to upgrade your computers for gaming, rendering and recording purposes, would you rather invest in the capture cards, or improving your computers hardware so that you didn't need a capture card, bearing in mind that any of my free time spent rendering video is time spent not gaming and recording...