You know, I had a desktop build of a similar vintage (late 2008) until recently. High quality for the time - C2D E8500 with 8GB of RAM, newer SSD and video card.

I said exactly that, "things haven't changed much since then". It ran well and all, and never overtly irritated me.

But the newest round of affordable mid-high end CPUs is a huge upgrade. Same with SSDs, even compared to ones a few years old. It's one of those things you don't really realize how big the difference is until you use them back to back.

Do it!

same here, I still have my Q6600 and I'd bet that 90% applications still run fine.

this is very very different from back in the 90s, in those good old days 18 months old PC is basically useless.

I think you misread parents post.

I had a Q9300, and than upgraded to some i7 because I needed more slots on the motherboard. I was very surprised by how much quicker the whole system was, even if I was under the same impression, that in the last years things didn't change a lot.

CPUs get faster by around 20% per year, but in 8 years this can get compounded a lot.

Pentium 60 (93) => 100 (94) => 166 (96) => 200 (96). It was cray cray

I am in a similar spot with a 7-year old, 6C/12T overclocked Xeon W3680. If Threadripper frequencies are decent it might finally be time to join the current generation of hardware. I would "settle" for a 12C/24T Threadripper if it were clocked as high/higher than the 16C/32T version, and at the right price point (ala the Ryzen 1600X). Doubly so if Intel follows through on opening up Thunderbolt licensing and I can add a Thunderbolt 3 expansion card to a non-Intel system in the future.

Optane isn't interesting, and while I have a fascination for AVX512 from discussions with a friend who does HPC, I know I concretely won't use it most of the time. The only unique thing that Intel offers me right now is Thunderbolt 3.