thanks for the fast replies.
the primary use is for gaming.. however that's not a daily thing. there is some rendering here and there...
in terms of gaming, i'm running just an asus gtx 1060 6gb. metro last light benchmark (max settings) gets me about 120-130 average FPS, in game it runs quite smooth in my opinion. i don't think it's capable of much more.. at some point i will upgrade the card..
i do happen to have a xeon x5670, and did manage to OC it to 4.4GHz, but i could only get it stable at 4.2GHz. at 4.2 i didn't notice a big difference in day to day performance, but in benchmarks however. it is noticable.. all tested on the same mobo. the xeon was a little easier to overclock with cooler temps, but as soon as i hit 4.3, i had to hit the vcore hard to even boot, in benchmarks it was hard to get the same scores as my 980x, let alone stable.
back to gaming, i do understand that a lot of games prefer fewer cores at higher speeds.. but are there really so many games that run single thread?