529th
What will be the DIRECT CPU PCIE lanes; not including the motherboard offerings, ?  And how does it compare to an i7 970, X58 ?

When you have really old stuff, the research needed to validate and justify any upgrade can involve some serious review daisy-chaining.  In other words, most reviewers only cover a few generations back, so you have to look at several generational reviews back to a popular equivalent to your processor.


First, let's start with this older review on Anandtech's website, it's the single-threaded performance of each generation. 



While Core i7-970 (or any Gulftown) isn't listed, per core, 32nm Westmere isn't that much from 45nm Nehalem, so you can consider the i7-920 as having similar per core equivalency to yours, unless you want to consider frequency is different.

Next, why this plot result specifically?  Zen 1.0 was said to match Broadwell in IPC per core, which isn't that far from Haswell (Broadwell was just the 14nm shrink from 22nm Haswell, same architecture).  In fact, AMD claimed to have improved the IPC on Zen 1.0 some 52% ahead of Excavator, which was 15-20% ahead of Piledriver (i.e. FX-8350 listed)-- which happens to be the same ratio difference in the plot result above between 4770K and FX-8350, approximately a 70% gap.  

If AMD manages to have Zen 2.0 match the Coffeelake refresh that is 9900K, or Whiskey Lake, that is around 10-15% ahead of Zen 1.0 and Broadwell/Haswell.  You instantly have an idea where Zen 2.0 will be against your processor, per core; which frankly, is where Intel's 9th gen already is, if you don't mind paying extra for it.

Finally, I believe based on this, your single-threaded performance from your i7-970 to a 6c-12t processor by either Intel (i.e. i7-9600K) or AMD (Ryzen 3-3300X) will result in at least a 50% performance improvement per core, per clock.

If you want, other processor single-threaded results exist for comparison.  

Thing is, do you just want to get another 6-core?  That's up to you, based on your usage patterns and what software you plan on.  For instance, my trend is that my core count need doubles every 4 years or so.  Got to keep track of your own patterns.