Yes, yes, this is why I haven't bothered to upgrade my 2500K, although it is actually time now, since games apparently learnt how to use more than 1 core.
I always went to some benchmark every year and saw single-core performance barely moving upwards.
I replaced my 2500K a couple years ago using the cheapest AMD components I could find. The main improvements were mostly in the chipset/motherboard:
- The PCIe 2.0 lanes on the old CPU were throttling my NVMe drive to 1GB/sec transfer rates.
- USB3 compatibility and USB power delivery were vastly more reliable. My old 2500K ASUS motherboard couldn't power a Lenovo VR headset for example, and plugging too many things into my USB hub would cause device dropouts.
- Some improvement in either DDR4 memory bandwidth or latency fixed occasional loading stalls I'd see in games when transitioning to new areas. Even with the same GPU, before the upgrade games would lock up for about half a second sometimes and then go back to running in 60fps.
Similar here. My main home machine's CPU held out for years more than previous ones had. I didn't do much by way of heavy dev/test/DB work in that period[†] so games were the only big processing it did[‡], and they only used a couple of cores properly or were bottlenecked at the GPU.
I upgraded early last year because I was doing a bunch of video transcoding, something where going from 4 to 16 cores really helps, and had finally started to notice it bogging down more than a little elsewhere. There was a per-core performance bump too in this case, that R7 2700/x was excellent value for money at the time. Also there was a goodly increase in memory bandwidth with the new kit, to keep those cores' caches full of things to be getting on with, but again that wasn't a massive bottleneck for my other uses up to that point.
[†] which I had previously, but personal dev has dropped off significantly since developing out-door habits (when you properly get into running it can be very time-consuming!) and day-job work is usually done via VPN+RDC when I do it at home.
[‡] and even then I wasn't spending time & money on the bleeding edge, though I did upgrade to a 1060/6GB for those that were demanding more than my old GPU could give)
how do you people do to survive. I have so much stuff running on my computer (intel 6900k) right now than I can see some amount of lag when selecting text in HN ?
