Very little improvement in gaming, maybe a few percent in gaming. You are better off waiting for Ivy Bridge which I read that should be out in the later part of this month. Even an i5 2500k will beat the i7 980 in gaming. Only time an X58 platform could beat a Sandy Bridge platform is if you are running 2 or more of the highest end cards in SLI/Crossfire (GTX 680, Radeon 7970) at 1080p or higher resolutions when GPU becomes the bottleneck since Sandy Bridge platforms are only limited to 16 PCI-E 2.0 lanes for graphics cards. If you are going to be running 2 ore more of the highest end video cards in SLI/Crossfire then I recommend an i7 3820 with an X79 motherboard. 4 cores is where it's at for gaming right now.