7970 and Phenom ii x4 955 Bottleneck Question

With the 955 you probably will get bottlenecked. I would say get the i5 3570k, its your best bet. The Phenom series, although good, is still old!

Hd 7970 would be bottleneck to your cpu.intel i5 3570k would best upgrade for you.and also make sure that 3570k supports new mobo as not all lga 1155 mobo supports 'k' series cpu.

Will is see much performance increase if I keep my 6970 and get the i5 instead?

Yes especially in CPU dependent game

Well maybe it wont get bottlenecked ,however i'm using 660 ti on a 955 n there is no bottleneck and maybe it will , anyways i'd rcommend u buying the 7970 and see if its gonna be bottlenecked or no and if u found it was then try to save for a couple of months to buy a new CPU, Mombo and the cpu u'v listed is a good one i'm telling u so cuz i think u have 50% chances to run ur system without any bottlenecking with ur current system and upgrading to better GPU is better than upgrding to a cpu in terms of gaming !

I'd get the i5. It's always good to have a pc with a strong intel backbone. I saw noticeable performance gains from switching from an old phenom II x4 processor to a sandybridge i5 2500k setup with my AMD 6870.

i5 it is... can anyone suggest an $100 to $110 motherboard for this?

If you're getting a locked i5 like the i5-3470, H77 motherboards are good enough already. The ASRock H77 Pro4/MVP
is available at Newegg for $79.99

If you're getting a 3570K, better get a Z77 motherboard. I recommend the ASRock Z77 Pro4 which is $109.99 at Newegg

Great, thats exactly what I'm going to get, thanks allot, and yeah I will be overclocking.  

Like Dennis said it is a good backbone and I can always upgrade my card later. Anyone know what I can do with my mobo and CPU? I don't think I can sell them as I accidentally threw away the boxes  

Thanks everyone.

With a pII 955, there will be high bottleneck with 7970. You will lose minimum 20fps in most of the games compare to 2nd/3rd gen i5. Even a 2nd/3rd gen i3 will give you more fps in games.

When you will use powerful gpu than 6950/7850 you need a powerful cpu/intel cpu to get rid of bottleneck.