Will a 7950 be bottlenecked if I use a i3 550?

I really want to know.

Yes, you can help by overclocking it to 4Ghz shouldn't bottleneck it too much at that point but its still a first gen i3

Will it really hurt my performance?

well it shouldn't as long as you can OC to 4Ghz, should be able to do that on a 20$ gaia heatsink from xigmatek

Alright thanks for the help!

I just looked into it a bit more and you can probably hit 4.5Ghz, so try to aim for that