So you know you can overclock the Q9650 to 3.6 (usually) without even raising the voltages.
If you are not raising the voltages you are putting a very small amount of extra stress on your CPU. It might sound like a high OC but with no voltage increase it really isn't.
The biggest fear when OCing a CPU is heat. If you do not raise the voltage there is not much extra heat added. Take my CPU for example. I run a little over 3.7ghz with only 1 bump up in the voltages on a Q9550 (which needs more stress to run at this ghz than the Q9650 would due to a higher FSB multiplier on the Q9650) and my temperatures stay under 50c under 100% load on air! The max safe (according to intel) for this CPU is somewhere around 68c and you can run it near 60c all the time with little fear. Not overclocked it ran only slightly cooler around 47-48c under load.
A lot of people run their Q9650s @ 4.0ghz 24/7 and don't see any performance degration for quite a while (years).
I urge you to OC your CPU to at least what the stock voltage can handle. You can really make a monster out of the Q9650 without much of a stressful OC (not to mention smash any stock Phenom II if you get to 3.6). You will not hurt you CPU in any way if your computer is unstable and auto-restarts (I OC a lot and have done it probably over 100 times on my Q9550, lol, and 200 times on my E8400 which I had at 4.0ghz for over a year with no performance drop), you simply just restart into bios and change the CPU to a lower frequency. We have some great OC tutorials here on Tom's or you can simply change your FSB upwards to 400 which will give you an easy 3.6ghz.
Oh yeah, and yes, the Q6600 on stock clocks will bottleneck a 4870x2.
Also, if you want to test out OCing, you can do it on the Q6600 you have since you are planning on getting rid of it (assuming, of course). If you get it to... oh... 3.2 it should perform similar to a Q9650, which can be done with minimal voltage increases and maximum safety.
A Q6600 is still a VERY capable gaming CPU and can easily run the 4870x2 to its max capabilities if you give it a little push.
OCing really isn't as dangerous as people make it out to be unless you go around changing a bunch of random things to extreme amounts.
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