Should i upgrade my Q6600 for gaming purposes?

If you have the money then yh sure go for it but if not then it really doesnt matter, the q6600 is a very good cpu that will still work fine with games

The problem you will run into is your motherboard will likely only have a PCI-e 1.0/1.1 slot. Those video card you mentioned are PCI-e 3.0 cards. There may or may not be potential compatibility issues. For example, some old motherboards with PCI-e 1.0/1.1 slots have issues with PCI-e 2.1 cards. It's rare, but it has been reported.

So far there hasn't been any reported incompatibilities with PCI-e 3.0 cards, but they have only been recently released and I am assuming most people who have upgraded has a motherboard with a PCI-e 2.0 slot.

What you can do is buy the card 1st, then if you run into issues upgrade to Ivy Bridge.

thank you for the reply's. My motherboard is pcie 2.0 compatible so i will take your advice and get the card before the cpu + mobo upgrade

Is your Q6600 overclocked? At stock speeds it'll for sure be a bottleneck on these new cards, I'd personally upgrade to Ivy at this point if going high end on the GPU.