Need CPU Upgrade advise

[Morgray]

My first Post here, been reading many various posts for a while, this time I seek help
So I am currently on a
Phenom II 550BE
4GB G.Skill F3-10666CL7-2GBPI (7,7,7,19)
ATI HD 4870
MSI C45 Mobo

I need some advise wheter i should upgrade to an I5 2500k Sandy Bridge CPU which iam heavily interrested in.
I am very much into emulation, which needs lots of CPU power that my old AMD CPU can´t deliver.
Also i would like to play games like Civilization 5 which requiere a good CPU, and i simply dont want to play them on my Phenom II.

So I would like to know if that would be a good decision, i know it would be unbalanced because of my HD 4870 but for emulation its more than enough and even most of the newer games work reasonably well.

Also I would like to know, after seeing this chart http://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU/62 if I would also get a slight-massive FPS boost. Like in that WoW Bench (I play WoW a bit) from ~70 to a whopping ~119 (+70% FPS in this example !!!I know it can vary heavily depending on the game)

EDIT: Ups, forgot something really important. I was also wondering if it maybe would be better to wait for Bulldozer, BUT since none of the emulators i use benefits form more than 4 cores it´s more important that the IPC is higher than to have a 8 core machine. So is it possible that Bulldozers IPC could be higher than Intels? I know its a stupid question since BD isnt out yet but assumptions are welcome.

PS:Could someone recommend me a Mobo for around 130(-)€?
Thank you for your time and help

 

[Arkaign]

Welcome to AT.

Yeah you have two options (assuming your existing cpu isn't unlockable)

(1)- Get PhII X4 or X6 Black Edition (X6 too $$ to make sense though), clock to ~3.5-3.6ghz or so easy just changing mulitplier. This should be more than fast enough to max out a 4870 in current games.

(2)- Dump your whole system and start fresh with SB.

Honestly I'd just swap the CPU if I were you. I have a PhII 955BE @ 3.5ghz, and there's nothing I can't play, including Civ5, @ 1920x1200. My video card is the bottleneck 100% of the time I run into framerate dips, and it's a 5770. I'd much rather have a SB if I were building today, but my performance is so good I'm in no rush to upgrade platforms, I'm definitely buying a new 560 or 6950 as my next PC purchase, as I'm seriously GPU limited.

 

[Morgray]

Yeah unfortunately i can´t unlock my Phenom II X2 , i´ll get some nasty articfacts in any 3d game, even if i activate only one more core.

The thing with a Phenom X4 or X6 is that
1:I dont need more than 4 cores
2:A 2500k crushes even an X6
3:Clock for Clock performance is really important for me so I dont want a Phenom II

I had always an AMD CPU, starting with an Athlon XP back in the days then an Athlon 64 after that a X2 and now the Phenom II