It must be the games you're playing, large scale strategy? Everything in my gaming rig is from 2008(LGA1366). The only thing I've upgraded since then is video cards. I ran an I7 920 Nehalem chip up until last year, when I "upgraded" to a Xeon X5675 from ebay as a drop in cpu replacement. Runs everything I throw at it completely maxed out at 2560x1600 resolution vsynced to the monitor refresh rate of 60hz.