Old School Processor Vs New School Processor

At this point it is time for an upgrade. You would see major benefits from the new chipset (storage features chief among them for Z97) and you would also see major performance increases from upgrading to a current CPU. Your processor is about 5 generations old and the technology in the new ones are light years ahead. The C2Quads are still quite good, but compared to the new ones they do not hold a candle. It is not like you are upgrading to Haswell from Ivy. You would be making quite a leap forward. You would also be able to take true advantage of DDR3 memory along with being able to have true native PCIe3 support. If you use VMs, I would recommend getting a Core i7 such as the new 4790k as you would be able to take advantage of the hyperthreading which you could use to allocate more cores to your VMs.

If you do decide to upgrade, make sure to get a decent aftermarket cooler. The new refresh chips do run a bit cooler but they still generate quite a bit of heat and something such as a Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo would be quite beneficial. You could also look at getting a new SSD or a Sata 6G drive. This could significantly increase your performance as well if you are still running on an old IDE drive or Sata 3G or below.

When you upgrade your memory, remember to get 1600 or 1866 memory. You can get higher clocked memory than that but you start to see diminishing returns compared to the price after those clocks.

What power supply are you using? You could possibly need to get a new one for it to be compatible with the new power saving steps that are in Haswell. It would allow you to save quite a bit of energy as your computer could idle using a tiny amount of watts.

The Asus board is good, but you could always take a look at MSIs Z97 boards. They have different versions such as the G series gaming models or the Mpower series. I would highly recommend the Mpower series if you want to overclock. I have a Z87 Mpower in my gaming rig and I have been able to use it to overclock test chips like a dream. So far the board has been rock solid in over 4 different rigs that I have built for friends and myself.