I would hope games know how to use more than 4 cores seeing as the current crop of consoles all have 8-core APUs, even if one or two of those cores are reserved for the OS/network stack.

XB1 and PS4 have been out with their 8-core APUs for 5 years now, hasn't changed the importance of single-threaded performance. Amdahl's law still applies.

Just because it uses more cores it doesn't mean the game is interesting to play.

I'm still running an i7-4790K I got around when it came out (5 years ago)... getting kind of anxious to build a new PC, not because I need anything faster. Upgraded to NVME drive and GTX 1080 a couple years ago.

Will probably do a new system in the spring with my income tax return. Leaning towards R7, maybe Threadripper, currently. They're finally getting faster enough to justify the cost.

aside: switched to hackintosh for my OS last year, been very happy. Hoping the osx-amd support isn't too difficult when I upgrade.

I am running an i5-2500k from 2011 as my desktop. Just dropped an rx580 in as my graphics card, and it's running great for my light gaming purposes (overwatch, 1080x60 screen). I think I could get away using it for 1440 or 1080x120 pretty comfortably.

> but they aren't much faster than the old ones

Each year the new CPU it's about 20% faster then the old one. After 4 years, it adds up. A top Intel CPU will now deliver twice the same single-thread performance than a 5 year old one of same price.

That's demonstrably not true. A 4 year old 4790K stands literally right next to 8-th gen CPUs in terms of both single and multiple core performance. A rather large leap happened when the architecture moved to DDR4, but CPU "performance" has hugely stagnated. I don't know where you're getting the 20% from but its definitely not the case in the last 5 years.

As a 4790K owner, I couldn't agree more. I just got around to doing a mild overclock and honestly the chip isn't holding me back even gaming 4k@60fps.

Same here. I'm going to wait for Zen2 before moving on. 8c/16t at 4.5+ GHz will be a compelling upgrade.

4k@60 is GPU bottlenecked, not CPU bottlenecked. It's pushing for 144fps where you'll start to be cpu bottlenecked in eg. Battlefield multiplayer or Assassins Creed. (also having a 4core/8thread cpu helps quite a bit vs 4core/4thread now that games have started pushing CPU limits again, especially with the 1% and 0.1% lows that cause stutter).

I've literally just upgraded from 4670K(4c/4t) to the 4790K(4c/8t) because Forza Horizon 4 was stuttering every now and then, the CPU was basically at 100% load all the time. Switching to a CPU within the same architecture but higher thread support has fixed all issues completely .

> the new CPU it's about 20% faster then the old one

Source? I suspect you're being shown a few choice benchmarks which demonstrate some improvement, perhaps where something became newly vectorizable...but realistic and consistent benchmarking doesn't show nearly that level of improvement.

One area in which you may benefit is in peripherals - an M.2 SSD and DDR4 RAM will help, and those aren't available on 5 year old motherboards. Also, power savings may be found with newer systems if you're in a laptop form factor where that matters.

But let's not pretend that single-threaded performance has doubled in 5 years. Here's one article that goes back quite a ways....and 2012 SPECint comes in at about 60,000 while 2017 comes in at 83,600.

https://www.karlrupp.net/2018/02/42-years-of-microprocessor-...

I doubt that number, too. Our CPU-bound workload runs "only" 20% faster on an i7-6xxx than it did on an i7-920 (calculated for equal clocks; due to the higher clock it was actually about 60% faster, which caused me to do the math because I feared a regression). That's far away from 20% per generation.

But in one thing you err: After a small custom BIOS mod, my home PC now boots from nvme - with a Z68 board (Sandy Bridge era), the module sitting in a PCIe adapter card. Was just a matter of adding some UEFI module.

Yeah, my mb had an nvme m.2 slot, but it was pciex2, so the x4 card (most seem to be) didn't work. Why I went with an adapter.

The main thing lately is when I'm running a lot of containers/vms for workloads it tends to box down a little. Outside of that and 4k 3d, don't notice it ever. But the new stuff is only just starting to get better enough that I may upgrade next year sometime.

M2 SSD is available on Haswell (Xeons at least) via a PCIe Board. Thats more than 4 years old.

I'm using a PCIe x4 card adapter for my NVME drive, runs great.