Please go away Martini, Bulldozer is very rarely worse, apart from Superpi, and a bunch of crap, its mostly the same speed, it generally offers the same performance in games as a x4, an x6, or a SB, or a Q6600 for that matter(overclocked Q6600 that is
).
Its almost twice as fast as a x6 in photoshop, faster in encoding, MUCH faster in winrar/7zip/par 2.
There's no evading its worse, when sometimes its 100% faster, there is NO situation the x6 is 100% faster than a bulldozer, and a couple that Bulldozer is around 100% faster than an x6, but there is no evading its worse?
Bulldozer is almost exactly where anyone with half a brain thought it would be, a little worse, the ONLY problem Bulldozer has is for a 315mm2 chip and 2billion transistors, its horrible, theres also likely some performance there simply from power settings.
My now 2500k(get over it I've said for an entire year I'd go 2500k if Bulldozer didn't suit ME in the situations I use and mostly due to power--- I live in a room that could loosely be described as a radiator), at 4.4Ghz(stock cooler for now) gains around 25% performance simply changing the bios power throttling from 95W to 120W. Power wise, again the only limit is the actual power, power efficiency is pretty awesome, Sandybridge its actually around 1.1-1.2billion transistors, 95W, Bulldozer 2billion transistors, 90-95% more transistors, 125W. Its only overclocked power I'm interested in anyway and that's where my room simply can't cope with it.
Anyway, on thread topic, you aren't bottlenecked by that chip and you won't be if you go crossfire.
Take Game A , with a single card you're not bottlenecked, you're running at 100fps already, a second card allows you to run at 180fps in which case you will be cpu limited and might only reach 120-150fps with that CPU, but in reality you'd use MSAA, top settings, and maybe buy a new screen and end up using a higher resolution, or run eyefinity in that game and then even with xfire, you're back down to 100fps, which your CPU is more than capable of.
Game B is crazy slow performance, you're getting 30fps at top settings but with one card you drop settings down to just under top settings to get 60fps. Then you throw in a second card, you don't want 100fps with not top settings, so you end up running top settings but now at 60fps, perfectly smooth and not cpu limited.
Game C, you get silly good performance on a single card, you're getting 100fps maxed out at 4k resolution, its not hard to run, you throw in a second card and you will be cpu limited, hell you might be cpu limited with a single card........ who cares. You still have awesome performance, sometimes games don't need xfire, I mean, take every game you've bought in the past 20 years, 95% of them are so old, slow and basic that xfire just isn't required. Some new games will also run great, thats life, you're still not losing anything not having an awesome CPU.
You use xfire to increase performance where its not good enough, or enable higher settings, or go to a new resolution, none of which will be cpu limited situations.
The only time a cpu is going to bottleneck you with or without xfire, is if you are one of those who love bigger jumps in quake 3 type games and want 250fps.
I'd probably try a slightly higher overclock, to help out with the few games that are more cpu limited, but there aren't many of them.
unless i get to doing that intel switch over of course
