Stumbled upon this P6N thread and thought I'd relay my Wolfdale experience so far. I just upgraded an E4500 @ 3.3 GHz (300 x 10) to an E7200 (and BIOS Rev. 1.7) running at speeds detailed below and am still doing a little fine tuning of VCC and FSB VTT for stability and longevity.
Your 280 GTX numbers sparked my interest, though, because now I find myself GPU limited. My new numbers in 3DMark06 with an overclocked 8800GT are now 13,667 @ 4.0GHz and 13,480 @ 3.8 GHz, a difference so small that it makes little sense to push the higher clock and voltage. More surprising, the Crysis Benchmark returned identical frame rates at 4.0 and 3.8GHz: 44.64 FPS (1280 x 1024, all settings High, no AA, V-sync off). Clearly, the next step up for me is a faster card, but your numbers make me wonder how much better I would do with the GTX 280. Would it be worth it at my current resolution, or only if I moved up to 1680 x 1050? Just don't know yet.
Anyway, I have to say this E7200 has turned out to be some pretty cheap power! I bought it because I had to get a new CPU/MB/RAM combo to upgrade an old Athlon XP that was getting flakey and saw the E7200/ECS GF7050VT-M combo at Fry's for $99. So I took the new proc for my gaming machine and handed down the old E4500 to run stock on the new cheapo MB. Even if you bought this combo and sold the MB on Ebay (they go for around $35-40) you'd have the new proc for around $65, a steal for a 4GHz Dual Core that, in games at least, will outperform an oc'd Q6600 and equal an oc'd E8400 at, what, 1/3 the price? (Remember: these Nvidia boards don't overclock anywhere near as well as the Intels, and I expect there's going to be real limits to pushing any of the newer procs with 1333 FSBs.) Maybe the cheapest way to get a whole lot more out of your GTX 280... Good luck!
My E7200 results so far:
4.009GHz (422 x 9.5) @ 1.46V (CPU-Z, idle) passing Orthos Blend for 24 hours with RealTemp readings of 26C min / 74C max temp. Before the 24-hour run, Orthos small and large FFTs also passed for 3 hours each. I know this is pushing it, but Intel's 1.45V max spec on this processor has been broadly and fairly challenged among overclockers (Google: "wolfdale 1.4v myth") and because my temps were okay I went ahead. Orthos Blend varies in its power damands and the 74C max temp was only intermittently hit. By contrast, I ran the Crysis Benchmark utility, an excellent surrogate for intense game play, in a 50-pass loop (in search of max stable overclock on my 8800GT) and the CPU only hit ~57C. That said, because my comfort level with current Intel processors is low 70s peak in Orthos and I don't particularly like pushing Intel's specified limits, I'm not yet entirely comfortable with this overclock.
An alternative I'm currently testing:
3.8GHz (400 x 9.5) @ 1.36V (CPU-Z, idle) is now running Orthos Blend in its sixth hour and the temp has not exceeded 65C. Because 3.8GHz benchmarks 3DMark06 in my rig only 125 points less than 4GHz does, I may well decide to keep it there as my final 24/7 choice. Haven't decided yet.
A note on my low-end HSF setup. Yea, I'm thrifty, but not stupid. The E7200 replaced an E4500, which had a heat sink twice as thick as the one included with the new processor, so I kept it. But there's a trick I've employed for a number of years with AMD and Intel stock HSFs. I use a Zalman fan bracket to mount a low-RPM 120mm fan an inch or two above the stock setup. (The initial idea was to be able to slow/quiet down the small high pitched HSFs while maintaining cooling in "silent" PCs.) Because it is larger in diameter it helps to keep the hot air exhausted at the base of the heat sink from feeding right back into the fan supplying it, greatly increasing the HSF's efficiency, and as a bonus it cools the NB heat sink as well. It's not better than the best of the aftermarket HSFs, of course, but it's as good as all but a few at significantly decreasing temps over stock. And you're out ~$10.