Will this be a big upgrade!

Dont get the dominator ram, you will get more ran with better performance for less if you get OCZ platinum or something else with CL7.

It will loosen the bottleneck a little but it will still be present with the GTX295. Depending on what you are doing will determine if you see a significant improvement. What resolution are you running at and what are you doing with the system?

I run everything at 1920 x 1200 and i game alot!

Gaming performance will see little increase with the cpu at stock speeds. Even overclocked, the gaming performance increase isn't worth the money. However, cpu intensive apps will run faster. Save your money and just overclock your current cpu to 3.2ghz.

Once you hit 4 gigs, any ram over that is overkill unless you refuse to end task when gaming, which will effect CPU performance more than the ram. Only thing you'd need more than 4 gigs for is large vid editing files or 3D rendering with multiple programs running.

So 6 gigs will be more than enough. Listen to hunter, lower CL is most important, even over speed.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/memory-scaling-i7,2...

To answer your original question, I don't think you'll notice much of a performance increase if at all. If you are not an overclocker, the i7 isn't running fast enough to notice a difference than the stock Q9300. If you are an OC, what is the Q9300 running at? Here, speed will be the biggest factor in what you are doing. Any title that runs into a CPU limitation on either CPU before running out of GPU power is already running at high enough frame rates that your monitor can't keep up anyway.

Assuming your main concern is gaming, I would ride your current system a little longer...and this is coming from a huge i7 fan. I think right now you would get the best bang for your buck by overclocking Q9300 as far as you can get it. You already have a really solid platform there so I wouldn't trash the whole thing to move to an i7 at this point. If you have already overclocked the q9300 to 3.2 or so and can't get it any higher, you might consider dropping a Q9550 in there which you should be able to get close to 4.0. The gain you get by moving to an i7 probably isn't worth it to you at this point.

The main reason im upgrading is.. i got a i7 920 vista ult and windows 7 for 129$. then i sold my old mobo,ram and cpu to buy the new mobo and sold vista ult for $100. So its only going to cost me the $ amount for the ram to upgrade. So i figure it would be worth it.

If anything im not going to see lower results? Im happy with any increase atm! So a 5 - 10% would be fine for 125$ lol

So, you already have everything but the ram? Then just buy 6gb of ddr3, a good heatsink, overclock your i7 to 4ghz and be very happy.

that is totally different than what I thought the question was....i7 is way better and more futureproof! But the real question is WHERE DID YOU FIND THE CPU AND VISTA FOR $129??

You'll see a decent increase, but that 920 will only really shine when you overclock it (it would be a waste not to with that Asus board). GeForce drivers really like the i7 as far as multi gpu setups.

O thanks for all the feedback guys. I got the i7 from intel on there training sites.

https://retailedge.intel.com/login.aspx

IF you work for a company like bestbuy, target, walmart, staples etc you sign up. Send them a pay stub. So some trainings and earn points twords there bundles. Its twice a year so.

What is a safe speed to overclock the 920 with the stock fan?

Thanks again for the feedback guys!

3.4-3.6 will be all you need, shouldn't be much of an issue on a stock fan. Mind you, I live in northern Canada.

How about this, since you already have everything, your original question is irrelevant.
Here is an idea........
Why don't you put it together and let US know whether or not it was a big improvement.