Windows 7 - Possible cpu upgrade opinions/ advice?

I'm currently running a E6850, I may soon have the opportunity to throw a QX9770 in this box. So far as I know my striker extreme board supports the chip. My issue is my ram it's pc2 8500 reaper. Now the chip is a trade, a very favorable one. Ram however I would have to purchase any kind of upgrade. This will obviously be the final upgrade I plan for this rig until I can afford to replace it. (may be sometime yet)

Anyhow, just curious if anyone thinks I should bother with the ram upgrade to compliment the new chip or if I should just be happy with it given my money situation is tight right now?

The QX9770 is very hard to find

Extreme editions are only worth buying if they have larger caches or something to that effect, but in this case, Q9550 has the same amount of L2 cache as the Q9650 or QX9770 (12MB).

well like I said it's a trade deal. I'm not losing much of anything a friend is building a new system and I'm getting his old extreme out of the deal and trading him something of no real value to me in return.

The ram is the real question.

Actually I'm now finding conflicting information about this chipset and the 45nm quads. So it may be a non issue. Disregard this post for the moment.