So I thought I'd provide some closure to this thread. I ended up buying the i5 2500k for $120 and the difference is ridiculous. I thew in an Asus P8Z68 mobo with 8 gigs of Vengeance 1600 ram and I have to say, I couldn't be happier. I got at least a 30 - 50% jump in performance in almost every game I played. I swapped out my 6950 (1GB) with my friend's 6950 (2GB) and honestly didn't see any change. This was all at max settings with AF at 16x and AA on 2x for some games. I could really care less about AA, I never use it anyways.
There was about a 1 - 2 frame difference with Gta IV with the minimum frame rate at 43. This is with as many texture packs/traffic mods as I could find. There was no frame rate difference with Crysis 1 using all Hi res texture/foliage texture packs. I'm sure if I knocked up the resolution to 1440p or turned up anti-aliasing I would require more video memory but everyone I have asked has stated that 1GB is enough for 1080p. Besides, the card does great with pretty much anything I need it to do and the tests the ran didn't show much reason to change anything video card related either.
Just wanted thank you guys for all your help and input for my build. I'll try to contribute more to the forums from now on
