OK, so I have a small slice of hat to eat. When I upgraded to the 780 last spring I didn't see an ENORMOUS benefit in my framerates which has led me to the closely held belief that my CPU is my bottleneck.
So, last night I loaded up DCS and played the Black Shark missions that give me the most grief with stuttering and ran MSI's afterburner in the background. Sure enough, my GPU hit 100% repeatedly while my CPU cores were just cruising along and not being too stressed at all.
So, I'm converted and while I still think I'd like an i7 I've made peace with the fact that my 780 6gb was likely a pretty poor purchase at the time and it should be first on my list to upgrade so the card went on Kijiji this morning.
With that said I'm a little gun-shy about spending the premium on a 980 as the difference in price between a 970 with an 1165 clock and a 980 with a similar clock is at least $200 Cdn, so would a 970 provide a reasonable bump or should I just sit on everything until the next gen video cards come out?