Q9550 questions related to I7 870

So to make a long story short my friend is giving me his old I7 system tomorrow, it's an I7 870 running on an EVGA P55 board (not sure which one). I'll be replacing my current rig ( Q9550 in a EVGA 780I SLI board with 8 gigs Ram ) with this new system since I figure an I7 is probably going to be better than a Q9550.

This has lead me to examine my overclock on the Q9550 which currently sits at 3.8 Ghz with a Core Voltage of 1.304V (according to CPUZ). Did I miss the boat on this guy? I mean, its rock stable at 3.8 and I never pushed it harder because I was used to OCing AMD systems. At 3.8 after 10 minutes of Prime95 the temps only get to 68/65/71/69 which is hot in AMD terms but doing some last minute looking online appears to be well within the limit of safe for the Q9550.

How much farther do you think this can go at 1.304V? What speed would I have to get the I7 up to to reach the performance of this Q9550 and beyond? On these machines I almost ONLY ever game. At the moment I'm running a Radeon 6870 (another reason I want to go to the I7 it will allow me to crossfire OR sli, I have the 6870 and a GTX 560 lying around and havn't figured out which one I want to go with for dual cards yet).

for gaming, the q9550 @ 3.8 will still play most games. Its a High end quad core from its day. Infact, I think that new, they still cost more than some of the i7 chips. You SHOULD be able to make 4ghz on a Q9550, depending on the chipset, Im not sure how the nvidia ones are for overclocking.

i think a i7 would be better because you could probly get it to 4ghz also so if hes Giving it to you why not but if you are buying it it maybe not worth it to get it because well it will not be that much of an upgrade

I think I'm going to go ahead and do the "sensible" thing here. And by sensible I mean thing that takes a ton of time and is fun. I'm going to simply benchmark the hell out of my current rig, then see what I can take the new rig to OCing and benchmark again and just compare the numbers. I was just hoping you guys would have some ideas of what I was looking at.

So real quick, this is what I'm doing -

Q9550 at 3.8ghz benchmarked using Geforce GTX 560, Radeon 6870, and Quad SLI GTX 295s for ****s and giggles. Then I'll run the same cards in the I7 and see where it ends up. I may also do some comparison runs against the G850 system I have built for my GF to play on.

Thanks for the help guys.

1.35v is about as far as i would go with a 45nm quad core on LGA775, 4ghz might be do-able (considering the rest of the parts). as far as the i series goes for gaming, depending on the game your going to see a higher FPS. some games "engines" just respond more to more cpu speed then gpu power. if the i is clocked the same as your Q9550 you will see a nice bumb in fps on cpu hungry engines. simply more efficent per clock then core 2, thanks to DMI/IMC.

comparing the two i's the LGA1155 setup will be a bit better, depends on your bench. the latter i has some tweaks to its core and overall platform which make it better/faster. this is going to be at stock or oc'd with the same cpu speeds.

as far as ocing the i7 870, without knowing the exact motherboard. it is hard to say how far you will be able to take it. i would suggest disabling HT as that will drop cpu temps roughly 5c or more. i dont however on the right setup see 4ghz being a problem for 24/7.