Upgrading dilemma... What would you do?

[So Shellfish]

I realise I posted this in the wrong forum to begin with. Oops.
Relevant Specs:

Latest Dolphin revision: 3.0-371
Windows 7 x64
Phenom II X4 955 @ 3.9GHz
Thermalright Silver Arrow CPU Cooler (as in I can overclock pretty well)
ASUS Crosshair V 990FX Motherboard
AMD Radeon 6970 @ 900MHz
12GB DDR3 @ 1600MHz
1920 x 1080 display

So I bought my motherboard anticipating bulldozer for a CPU upgrade because I have already begun to feel that my CPU is holding back my system. I'm pretty confident that my issues in Dolphin (below full speed in pretty much every game at my desired settings) is due to a CPU bottleneck. CPU usage in Dolphin for my is almost 100% on all four cores. However, in some cases, with SSAA enabled on high internal resolution, my graphics card reaches 99% utilisation. This worries me as although I have read that Dolphin is highly CPU oriented and does not require an extremely high end GPU, mine seems to be working pretty hard. I am also aware that Dolphin does not support multiple GPUs and that Bulldozer is absolute garbage so I'm faced with a few problems to solve:

Is my graphics card really holding my system back with Dolphin? (this would mean I'd have to get a 7970 or GTX 580 for increased performance, although I'm not aware of whether or not Dolphin prefers Nvidia or AMD's GPU architecture)

With my CPU as my limiting factor here, what would be the best upgrade? (i.e. platform switch to Sandy Bridge or wait for Ivy)

Is an AM3+ CPU completely out of the question for an effective upgrade?

The games I play on Dolphin are:
Animal Crossing
Fire Emblem
Mario Kart (Wii/Double Dash)
Mario Super Sluggers/Superstar Baseball
SSBB/SSBM
Sonic: Adventure 2 Battle, Colours, Heroes
Super Mario Sunshine/Galaxy
Star Fox Adventures/Assault
(I'd like to know if my expectations in terms of settings (3x Native Res/4x SSAA) are unrealistic)


Please let me know if you'd like any more information.

[Covert_Death]

quit trying to max out dolphin would be my suggestion, if your just cranking everything up, no computer will run perfect now matter how strong a machine it is.

you have to fine tune dolphin, i have a very similar setup and have zero problems at 3x res at full FPS in all games including super mario galaxy and mario kart

i have a 955 @ 4.1Ghz
8Gb DDR3 RAM @1600
2x GTX 460 in SLI (dolphin doesn't use sli so just a gtx 460)
and an AsROCK extreme4 990FX mobo

i would just start tweaking settings to get your pc running dolphin better you have a pretty decent rig, but if you are intent on upgrading i would go the CPU route first if you just have to upgrade, besides that my next suggestion would be to get another 6970 in Xfire, its cheaper and will preform better (again dolphin won't do Xfire but a 6970 is more then enough for dolphin)