You're very welcome. There's nothing wrong with an i7, but if you're on even a fairly generous budget, it's an expensive processor and the money could often be spent better elsewhere.

One thing that is good about the i7 is that because it is total overkill it will probably be 4 or 5 years til you need to upgrade it and in the meantime you can keep buying new graphics cards until you find one that keeps up with it. I kept my last one (i7 950) for four years and 3 different graphics set ups (actually it should only have only been two cards and therefore only one change in setup, but one of the cards died so i had to RMA and get something else). My current 4770 is 3 years old this month and if i were to change anything in my current rig it would be the graphics card, not the CPU.

Anyway generally if you can work out what component is holding you back, you can target that for upgrade and get the best bang/buck performance gains when upgrading. And best of all you will always notice the improvement. It's not always obvious what is slowing you down, though.