Would you guys recommend this quad core option over my e8500 as a performance upgrade? Clock speeds will undoubtedly be lower but I have heard over and over that my GTX 285's in SLi are not being used as they should with a Core2 Duo...i5/i7 Is not an option right now..

i had the q9300 and didnt want to make the change to p55/x58 either. i picked up an e8500 for around $100 and was very pleased. im running it at 4.0 right now without any issues, or even having to push my ram. for almost every game it has done better than my old q9300, which doesnt OC well at all. sc2 is the first game that my e8500 has struggled with. 1080p ultra settings run pretty well vsynced at 60 during normal gameplay, but will start to dip easily on custom games with thousands of units. using atitray tools you can monitor cpu and gpu usage, and my cpu will run almost maxed out on SC2 while my 5870 is only at about 30%, talk about a bottleneck. If I were you I wouldnt upgrade to the c2q. continue to save for a whole new p55/x58 setup where you can the get clock speeds of the high end c2duos but with atleast 8 threads and low power consumption