BE 955 bottleneck for 6870 crossfire?

Hey all I've been having some trouble with my 6870s in crossfire.

First here's my specs.

XFX 6870 crossfire - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

ASUS M4A88TD-v EVO Motherboard - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

8GB Gskill Ripjaw - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

Corsair HX750 power supply - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

Phenom II x4 BE 955 3.2ghz cpu - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...


I've noticed in games such as BF3 and Skyrim none of the gpus go above 50% At first I thought this might be due to drivers so I tried all kinds. currently am on 12.1 I know that your second card doesn't run as good as the primary card but I'm not sure these are scaling correctly.

I also realized that the Mobo that I'm using has 1 x16 PCI-E 2.0 and 1 x4 PCI-E 2.0 from what I understand when you have 1 slot running at x4 the main card has to slow itself down to the same speed as the 2nd card. Is that correct?

I was thinking that changing the motherboard to one that ran x8 x8 would give me more frames but I've also noticed in Core Temp that when In game with crossfire on or off my cores get really high load. I wouldn't say they max out in BF3 but they jump around from about 85% to 95% does this mean that maybe my cpu is bottlenecking?

I was thinking about maybe getting a 2500k and new mobo but then again my BE isn't totally maxing out so I don't know if I should shell out the extra money. Would doing so give me a boost in frames more so than just changing the motherboard to a x8 x8 motherboard?

Thanks a bunch for any help I appreciate it.