looking to upgrade from i7 920

I recommend a i5 4690k and a Asus z97-a, i bought it for my rig about 4 months ago and had no issues so far. It was built mainly for gaming, good luck.

If you upgrade you should get an SSD. So you could simply copy over your old data from the old drive to that one.

I wouldnt "upgrade" from an i7 to an i5. The trend is that more and more multithreading is used and soon your new i5 would need to be upgraded again.
If I were you and had enough money, I would get a 2011-3 platform instead with an i7-5820k.
But then again, since you said next year, you could probably also wait for Broadwell-E, which is due in Q1 2016.
But in any case, upgrading to a Haswell next year would be the worst possible choice.

I copy her an old form answer will help you to overclock your cpu and get good performance without loos money:

" Some of the responses to your original post were comical (I was just browsing some old posts and came across this one - maybe I can be of experienced help here). Don't bother OCing the GPU or memory - these really don't buy you anything other than trouble unless you are a gamer, then just get a more current GPU.

The i7-920 was one of the best overclocking processors ever and remains so. As was mentioned already, the 'K' designation for Intel CPUs wasn't even in existence when these Bloomfield class CPUs came out. Although my current beast is an i7-3930 OCed to 4.6GHz, my i7-920 is still running strong as a media server running at a 4.0Ghz clock for years - it still outperforms newer CPUs when overclocked properly.

Here are my i920 overclocking specs as a reference point - YMMV. With an H100 cooler the temp never exceed 75c running the most stressful Prime95 blended tests for 24 hours and never fails under use under heavy loads.

CPU: i7-920 (D0 stepping) Socket 1366 X58 Chip Set
Cooler H100
Memory: 24GB 1600Mhz Corsair Vengence
Motherboard: Asus P6T
Overclock Mode: XMP
eXtreme Memory Profile: Profile #1 1600MHz
CPU Ratio: Auto
SpeedStep: Enabled (set AFTER stress testing)
Turbo Mode: Disabled (enabling turbo mode with a 4.0GHz OC will make it unstable)
Base Clock: 200 (yes, you DO best overclock the i7-920 by upping the BCLK)
PCIE: 100
DRAM Frequency: DDR3-1603MHz
UCLK Frequency: 3208MHz (always double the DRAM Frequency)
QPILink Data Rate: Auto

The following DRAM timings should be set automatically as a result of selecting XMP OC mode):

DRAM CAS # latency: 8
DRAM Delay: 8
DRAM Pretime: 8
DRAM ACT: 24
DRAM Cycle: 88

CPU Voltage: 1.28125
CPU PLL Voltage: Auto
QPI/DRAM Core Voltage: 1.3
IOH Voltage: Auto
IOH PCI Voltage: Auto
ICH Voltage: Auto
ICH PCIE Voltage: Auto
DRAM Bus Voltage: 1.62
Load Line Calibration: Enabled (adds stability)
CPU Differential Amp: Auto
CPU Clock Skew: Auto
CPU Spread Spectrum: Auto
IOH Clock Skew: Auto
PCIE Spread Spectrum: Disabled

Ironically you can get an i7-920 CU for $40 on eBay and also 1366 MOB for a song outperform many late model CPU/Bulds. My 4.0GHz i7-920 is still a beast of a quad-core build.

Regards,
Mike "

baha_timimi is right. If you dont really want to upgrade (since you dont have the money), then you shouldnt. That i7 920 is a very good CPU which will last you another few years if you overclock it. Upgrading to a Haswell i5 would not get you that much boost in performance and possibly even a decrease in perfomance in games that support more than 4 cores.
Either save for a real upgrade or just buy a better cooler and overclock your old one and get a SSD.

Having an SSD doesnt mean you cant use a HDD anymore. You can buy a small SSD for the OS, programs and maybe a few games and put the rest on the HDD. Thats what most people do. Just an SSD will give you a huge boost in performance.

What mobo you have, it might be wise to look after some Xeon is you want to stay on your platform.

I would like to recommend Skyake . Before you say no thank you ill just wait or get the next best thing let me tell you the things that i would like to have that it offers..
there is some slight gains in performance over haswell in most applications. Not to say all applications are running very much the same with a Haswell part. Skylake does have more instructions that will make it much faster in encoding things such as H264, VP9...ect. Also DDR4 and DDR3 support. Though i doubt there will be a caveat as seen before with Core 2 when DDR3 was implemented. And the final and best thing is the FIRV is no longer on the die, ahh.

"Next Gen 32nm 6-Core Processor Ready!"
Core i7-9xx
Core i7-9xxX
Xeon 36xx
Xeon 56xx

On ebay:
Xeon X5687 - 4 x 3.6 GHz ~80$
Xeon X5650 - 6 x 2.67 GHz ~ 70$
Xeon W3670 - 6 x 3.2 GHz ~ 140$
Xeon X5679 - 6 x 3.2 GhZ ~ 100 $

Last option seems most interesting, its the last line of Xeons on that socket, so it has lowest TDP and possibly could OC well.
Give it a love with your mobo and you gonna laugh in the face over those "gaming" i5's selling for over 200$ now.
While there is not official support for Xeons from Assus on this board, there is multiple forums confirming its doable without much of an effort (bios upgrade at max):
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1855640

EDIT:



I'd like to see Xeon X5679 @ 4 Ghz vs 6600k tested... you would be suprised.
Considering in this scenario cost = ~100$ vs 350+150+50 = 550$ i would like to say LOL!

On the contrary.. that X5650 is a newer architecture and it looks technically superior almost in every aspect.
Just look yourself:
http://ark.intel.com/compare/47922,41447
As for me and you specific request thats probably one of the best possible upgrades considering cost of investment.
Add some good cooler like Hyper 212 EVO (if you don't have any decent cooler yet) try to OC and you certainly will not regret it.

For dual Xeon you would need a workstation\server grade motherboard. Xeons as shown on Ark comparison, have "# of QPI Links = 2" which means 2 processors can be linked together on a single mobo. Finding motherboard for this wouldn't be neither cheap or easy. 12 cores / 24 threads... yeah it would probably take another decade or even more to get anything near that performance from a single CPU