I thought it was on dodge junk also:)
But anyways your conroe 2.13ghz 775 chip does overclock to 3ghz+ in most cases but it definitely getting long in the tooth. But would make a great HTPC cpu with a 7750 or so dedicated low power graphics card that just so happens to have enough power to game at 1080p with some settings turned down. Plus you can find them in low profile size and they do not need a pci-E power connector. They pull all there voltage from the pci bus.
You would notice a huge bump in performance upgrading to sandy bridge and or ivy bridge. Even a i3 2120 65watt dual core with HT is very very snappy. But if you have the money i rec a i5 dedicated quad core if you do much video encoding and highly threaded applications.
As for Smart Response tech, It can cut your load times almost in half with the z67 and newer chipsets like z77, z75.
Here is a link from may of last year with a small 20 gb cache drive.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4329/inte ... g-review/4 But i feel you are beter off getting a 128gb SSD and load you OS and whatever stuff you use all the time and get a large slave HDD say a 1-2TB caviar green or the new reasonably priced but better performing "NEW" caviar RED drives.
I am running a old 1st gen corsair force 60gb SSD drive with 3 2tb caviar green storage drives on my gaming rig. The 2 TB green drives perform good enough to run games from also. Since i grabbed my SSD back when they cost twice as much as today 60gb is too small and SRT was not available on my Gigabyte p67-ud4-b3 WITH A 2600K. My 60gb drive quickly was overfull and i run almost all large games off of my green HDD's. Wish i did have SRT but i built my rig over a year and half ago and not one problem so i cannot complain. Plus how many computers over a year and a half old are still in the top 5% when it comes to performance. I am very happy with my purchase and its the only computer i have built that was not outclassed in 6 months like back in 2004 or 2005 when i built my watercooled 4800x2 with dual x1800xt's in crossfire. Heck a month after i built it the dang 1900xts came out i was very disappointed
I am sure The desk top Sandy/Ivy Bridge cpus will serve everyone who has one for many years to come without the need for upgrading. But on the laptop front i think Intels Haswell cpus with the supposed 3x graphics improvement over the ivy bridge IGP will be very popular for a bit of gaming on the cheap with long battery life.
2600k@4848mhz @1.4v CM Nepton40XL 16gb Ram 2x EVGA GTX770 4gb Classified cards in SLI@1280mhz Stock boost on a GAP67-UD4-B3, SBlaster Z powered by TX-850 PSU pushing a 34" LG 21/9 3440-1440 IPS panel. Pieced together 2.1 sound system