At first glance, the obvious choice is the 9500, yes, but hear me out...

So I've finally gotten to the point where my 2.4GHz just doesn't cut it anymore, but I wanna wait until Intel's quad-core setups come out next year before I build an all-new system, so I gotta do something to my current system to get me through the year. The answer: overclocking! Turns out that I've been sitting on Intel's most overclockable chip of the past 3 years and I didn't know it. I have a D1-stepping Pentium 4 2.4C GHz. It's quite easy to get this chip up to 3.2GHz, maybe even further. Obviously I'd need a better cooler.

The 7000CU is massively heavier than the ALCU for not that much performance gain (nill on some reviews), so I'm broken between those. Also, the 9500LED does not blow down on the MOSFETS and such of my soon-to-be ASUS P4P800-E board, so I'm not sure whether to get the extreme beast of a 9500 and lose the ability to cool down the MOSFETS. Any suggestions?

I have a 2.4C and a Zalman 7000cu on a P4C800-E Deluxe, it will do 3.6 stable at the default voltage. It will boot into windows at 3.7ghz, and post into the bios at 3.8ghz.

9500Led

9500, amazing performance, plus it looks awesome! and the airflow is more efficient, if you point the fan into the outtake fan of your case, it extracts all the cpu air at once, which makes for amazing temps, plus the led is awesome as well. my friend has one, and hes waiting for me to go over and oc it for him once he gets his 7900gtx 512mb (he returned his new 7800, as eVGA released the 7900 the same day he got his card, so he gets a free upgrade.)