[kenrikm]

CPUs seemed to hit their sweet spot around 2010 and have not made a huge amount of practical progress since. Up until about 2 weeks ago my gaming PC was running a i5 750 a processor released back in 2009 and still able to run all but the most demanding games on max settings GTA5 being the exclusion. Even my video cards (GTX660ti in SLI) are on older side having been released back in 2012/2013?.

Recently My PSU Blew and took the motherboard with it so I purchased a i5 4460/Z97 Combo for about $300 from Amazon which clears up the bottleneck in GTA5. This CPU is already a year old but I'm glad to see it's within 1-2FPS of the new chips in most games. Most likely won't even need to look at upgrading for another 5 years.

I think to some extent intel is backing themselves into a corner with this release, their last generation was so good (i5 4690k or 4460) that Skylake seems rather lackluster.

[Nursie]

Was looking at this earlier today as my machine is about 4 years old now.

From what I can tell, moving from my i5-2400 (Sandy Bridge) to the i7 6700K (Skylake) would apparently buy me about a 70% performance boost. But then moving to a 4790K (Haswell) gets me a 69% boost. And I could get a 40% boost by buying a 3770K (Ivy Bridge), and then I wouldn't even need a new motherboard, RAM etc....

[kenrikm]

DDR3 and DDR4 are about the same performance and Skylake supports DDR3. You most likely don't need to upgrade your RAM regardless.

[paulannesley]

Skylake supports DDR4 and DDR3L but the slots are incompatible; motherboard manufacturers need to choose one or the other. All the Z170 boards I've seen do not have DDR3L slots. Even if they did, DDR3L is lower voltage than DDR3; standard DDR3 will never work in a Skylake board.

[coldtea]

Well, it's not exactly 1% difference between Haswell and Skylake. Where did you get that?

[Nursie]

Some crappy cpu comparison site ;)

It's not clock-for-clock or anything like that, that was comparing the absolute top of the range desktop Haswell (4790K) to the one Skylake i7 released so far. Or rather comparing both against my i5 2400.

I'm not exactly sure what to do now. I probably don't actually need a processor upgrade anyway, the graphics card is the more important part.

[coldtea]

From what I read it's actually more 8-10% increase (bigger in some cases, smaller in others). Still not much, but good enough.

More important for me are other stuff we get with new architectures (support for Thunderbolt 2, better integrated graphics for low power laptop use etc).

[Nursie]

Yeah there do seem to be loads of platform-related improvements since sandy-bridge.

The thing that's got me thinking about upgrade recently was deepdream, which probably doesn't care about any of those and just needs more raw power, on the CPU and the GPU.

Not that I'll probably care about that when my current fascination with it wears off in a couple of weeks...

[imaginenore]

You are only looking at the game performance, which is usually not CPU bound.

If you do any serious computational work, modern CPUs are making tons of progress, especially Xeons.

[bkjelden]

I'm still running a Q6600 + 8GB RAM I bought in 2007.

I don't really do gaming, so my perf demands aren't as high as yours. But if you'd told me, in 2007, when I bought that CPU, that it'd still be usable - much less sufficient - 8 years later, I'd have thought you were crazy.

[enraged_camel]

Yeah. I have an i2500k (sandy bridge), not even overclocked, and about a month ago I upgraded my GPU from a GTX 570 to a 970. I can run all modern games at max settings (1900x1200). Occasionally I've needed to turn shadow quality from "extreme" to "very good" but that's about it.