1st gen i7 is todays...?

[CiderSpy]

my first gen i7 2.8ghz 6 cores.
what does that compare to 4th gen.. are the i3's over all better then what I have?

 

[Yonose]

You can compare CPU's here:
http://cpuboss.com/compare-cpus

 

[CiderSpy]

i3 4330 it's the closest one, and I'll get PCIe3 and usb3 from a z87 board first gen don't have that

 

[LucoTF]

My i7-930 @ 3.8ghz is roughly equal to an i5-4440

comparing yours to an i3-4330 sounds about right

I get usb3 via a pcie card, don't care about pcie 3.0 but 6gb/s sata would be nice

 

[PennyLife]

Do you mean you have the quad core first gen Core i7-930? Because the lowest clocked 6-core i7 from the first generation was the i7-970 at 3.2 GHz.

Anyway, the Core i7-930 is about equivalent in performance to the 4th gen Core i3-4350 according to this chart: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html