Will an AMD Phenom 2 X4 965 bottle neck a 7950?

If your cpu is running at stock speed then yes.
Or if you overclock your cpu as high as possible then NO.

A Phenom II x4 965 will be a bottle-neck for the Radeon 7950 in several games, depending on the situation. You might want to overclock it to get the most out of it if you play any CPU-bound games. Around 4GHz could alleviate it enough in such games. For example, BF3 MP with 32-64 players could be too much for stock to handle very well, but an overclock might help enough to resolve that. However, unlike what xtreme5 said, there is absolutely no guarantee. I wouldn't go past the Radeon 7950 with that CPU, just as a warning. An LGA 1155 i5 would be a better choice for a higher end gaming computer.

overclock your cpu as xtreme 5 said and also try to get the highest and coolest card you can lay your paws on!

Thanks for all the replies! I have her on stock clocks right now, but I do have a custom cooler. So, I'll see how close to 4.0Ghz i can get her. (I've heard 4 is rare for these chips)

Any thoughts on the performance impact of my PCI Express 2.0 slots with a PCI Express 3.0 card?

On the CPU, if it's a C3 stepping 965, 4GHz shouldn't be much of an issue. On PCIe, there'll be no impact at all.

To be honest, if half these people that replied to you post never looked at much benchmarks with the 965 and the 7950/7970. Only way it would bottleneck if its a game like skyrim where core for core matters like and Intel of course comes ahead in that department. Now get a game like BF3 where it uses the GPU more then the CPU (I know it uses a good amount of CPU) the CPU wont bottleneck.

As been said over and over, It really depends on the game. On a crappy good for nothing port like skyrim like said, it might bottleneck where Intel would come ahead. OC the CPU-NB to 2600 - 2800mhz+ and you'll be surprised what the phenom II can dish out as these benchmarks never OC the CPU-NB on these phenom's.

If AMD would of made the Bulldozer's with a slightly lower clock and 3000mhz CPU-NB, the CPU would more then likely suppress the speed of the Phenom's.

There is definitely NO difference between PCI-e 2.0 vs 3.0 google it you'll get many reviews in which they are about identical.

The bottleneck will be completely game dependent but generally no bottleneck. An OC will be good too.

Ran a 7970 with a Phenom II x6 at 4.0 GHz for a couple months... no bottleneck in most games, but from my game library, I had bottlenecks in:
Starcraft 2 and all other RTS games
Skyrim
The Witcher 2
Crysis and Crysis Warhead

All those titles saw sizeable performance increases when I went to my current CPU. Some older games like Portal 2 and Dragon Age also saw performance increases, but they already run so well on a Phenom 2 that it's hard to call it a bottleneck.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon-hd-7970-cpu-scalin...
Depending on the resolution you may see a bottleneck even if you overclock.But since most people play on 1080p monitors these days that shouldnt be a problem.

keeping the higher resolution the more lesser bottleneck you'll acheive.

this reply right here slightly less in actual CPU and GPU strength (though ratio wise might equal out in the comparison)..

I have a GTX 580 SuperClocked and felt the same issues.
965BE @ 4.0GHz and 975BE @ 4.2GHz - including SSD.
and I still went 2500K..