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Should I upgrade?

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PicodeGallo

Member
Joined
Oct 18, 2010
I was wondering if it's time to upgrade the i5-2500k to the new Skylake cpu (i5 or i7). My current 2500k, still running at 4.5 GHz, seems to be doing alright--been very stable for a couple years now. I'm in the process of upgrading my monitor and GPU. Will do 1440p for now and possibly the 980 Ti, 980 at the least, depending on what else I need to upgrade. Specs in sig are current. I haven't kept up with the CPU's since Ivy, so I was wondering if Intel has made any serious improvements yet. I'm not a hardcore overclocker and don't require bleeding edge tech, just a nice, smooth gameplay experience. Thanks!
 
i was looking into this as well, and while the new skylake stuff is an improvement for sure, a 4.5ghz 2500k isn't bottle-necking any games yet, except maybe gtav on high settings
 
I am also on 2500k and decided not to upgrade. IvyBridge->Haswell->Skylake has offered about 5-10% performance per clock increase with each generation. So assuming you can overclock a Skylake about as high, you are looking at maybe 25-30% higher performance.

For me that just doesn't justify the cost of new CPU ($250 for i5-6600k) + new motherboard ($115 on the low end) + new RAM ($120 for 16GB DDR4). 2500k + motherboard + DDR3 RAM can't be sold for much anymore since the world has already moved on to DDR4, and few people would want to buy DDR3 now.
 
I am also on 2500k and decided not to upgrade. IvyBridge->Haswell->Skylake has offered about 5-10% performance per clock increase with each generation. So assuming you can overclock a Skylake about as high, you are looking at maybe 25-30% higher performance.

For me that just doesn't justify the cost of new CPU ($250 for i5-6600k) + new motherboard ($115 on the low end) + new RAM ($120 for 16GB DDR4). 2500k + motherboard + DDR3 RAM can't be sold for much anymore since the world has already moved on to DDR4, and few people would want to buy DDR3 now.

That's my line of thought as well. The performance increase would need to justify the extra $500 spent on upgrading.
 
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