[robmaister]

My i7-2600k @ 4.4GHz agrees with you. The only reason I would upgrade would be for better USB 3+ support (I have a hard time with anything more complex than a SuperSpeed flash drive).

SSDs are by far the most cost-effective upgrade you can get nowadays. HDDs tend to be the bottleneck for boot times and general "snappiness" nowadays.

[Nursie]

The reason I would upgrade from there is PCIe 3.0+, and thus support for fast NVME cards. They are almost as much a step up again from SATA SSD, as SATA SSD was from spinning rust IMHO

IIRC the sandy bridge generation could only do PCIe 2.0.

[robmaister]

Very true, I did just recently pass up a great deal on an NVMe drive because I can't use it in my current setup. I believe PCIe 2.0 will also bottleneck USB 3.2 (or Gen 2x2 or whatever the naming scheme is now), and whatever GPU I upgrade to next (I read that it's a bottleneck with the GTX 1080 and up)

NVMe is the only thing that will cause a noticeable improvement for me though, seeing as I still game on a 1080p60 monitor and generally don't need that sort of speed from any USB peripheral.

Still, the processor itself kicks ass and I think the only reason why most people would need to upgrade are for newer peripherals.