Intel

Alder lake is also cheap and plentifully available. I replaced 16 cores of sandy bridge xeons with a i5-12400 and it's *so much faster* in every way.

Nearly 13 years on the same CPU!? Upgrade today my man. If you live near a Microcenter they’ve got some killer deals right now. I’m seeing the 14700k bundle that includes a good board and 32GB of RAM for $500. I’d jump on that and not look back.

Cpu prices are good, ram prices are decent and storage prices also good. Generally a good time to make a purchase. There is always going to be something new coming that you could wait for. But it will be expensive at release so you need to wait 4-8 months for it to drop to more reasonable levels. By the time you reach that time period, you realise the new gen is coming soon so maybe wait for that... And the cycle goes on. Forget about the longevity of Sandy Bridge. That was an anomaly due to poor cpu performance progress during ~2012-2019 and certainly not the rule. Nowadays cpus can get outdated after 3-4 years depending on what you are doing.

I would not buy a CPU without igpu. If you have to troubleshoot gpu problems its worth the few bucks.

im impressed you are on sandy I thought i was frugal being on Haswell till recently :)

never wait, your be waiting for ever , 12,13, 14 gen all good

Whilst cpu pricing is good right now, desktop arrow lake won’t be launched til next year October probably since 14th gen launched at that time. Waiting an entire year makes no sense if you need to upgrade now. For this reason most are building on AMD am5 since the 8000 series will also be am5. Lga1700 is end of life since 15th gen is not going to use this socket. As long as you are aware of this then do the move you want. I went with a 12600k since the deal was too good to pass up but I built on ddr5. I am sure you will find some decent priced bundles for a 13600 or even 14600.

I also still have a SB i5-2500K OC'ed in a second system at home and it still runs fine - I'd say wait another 10months for 15th gen or try the AMD X3D Chips if you want to upgrade now.

i5-2500k to 7800X3D here. Been in the same boat but ultimately AMD 's offering for just gaming seems much superior in every aspect. Having the ability to maybe upgrade to a 9800X3D also looks very enticing.

for intel, i would wait for 15th gen otherwise if you cant wait then go with amd am5 now

Get a 13th or 14th gen you won’t be disappointed

Lots of Black Friday deals going on right now. Just got a i7 12700k for 199.99. That’s a hell of an upgrade at a sweet price.

4th gen haswell still going strong will upgrade hopefully in upcoming months ..though tdp now a days for top tier processors is scary …power draw alone from cpu now days will exceed my current power draw by miles and lets no forget free heating during winter days 😂😂

Whatcha gonna use it for? gaming? I honestly wouldn't recommend intel. They are good dont get me wrong but if you want something that is gonna last you the next 10, you better go with the best that can be offered which currently is 7950X3D.

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The other option is to buy the cheapest am5 CPU and wait 6 months for AMD 8000 series 3D chips, they claim 15% improvement. If that is truly the case then it'd be a no brainer.

If you have a MicroCenter nearby, they have killer bundles for CPU, mobo and memory for both AMD and Intel.

I see AMD and Intel as more or less equal these days. Both do better in certain tasks than the other, and neither is without its flaws. So I'd spec a few systems from each based on your needs and go with the better priced one.

Arrow lake will be a huge TOCK

New smaller node, means more efficient chips, and if Intel trows efficiency out of the window again you will get same consumption for more huge frequency gains or more cache.

Even if IPC is the same per clock, atlest you will get a more efficient chip

Binned 14900K can already do 6ghz all core, image that with a smaller node.

I know frequency is not everything on but in all Intel archs, they all scale very well with frequency

I upgraded from i7-2700K to i7-13700K at end of 2022. I mainly did it as I bought a 3080 Ti to replace my 1080 Ti and didn't want to severely bottleneck it. And yes I did run the 3080 Ti with my 2700K for a few weeks.

If you need the upgrade now then upgrade now. There will always be something newer/better on the horizon. Unless there is some specific feature that Arrow Lake has that you absolutely need, there is no real reason to wait imo.

13600kf is nearly twice as fast as a 2500k. if you need it or not you have to know yourself

Thanks, everyone. You've all been very helpful! I will buy now. Those Microcenter deals do indeed look terrific.

(And I will even take a look at AMD, thanks to some of your suggestions!)

You would be a fool to buy the KF, it's even in the name!

The igpu does a lot more than just hang out as a backup. It can use its efficient encoders and decoders to playback videos or video editing scrubbing.

Also the sweet spot CPU is now the 14700K. It also supports the Intel Game Boost.

If youre asking reddit.... you need a 14900k, rtx 4090, and 128gb of whatever ddr5 is fastest atm. If you dont, solitare wont run at 11467 fps, and only hit a meagre 10768fps. Dont be a peasant. Solitare demands 16k

I'd get a 7800X3D. It seems like you like to keep your pc for a long time, and that one will definitelly serve you for years to come!

upgrade now, the 13600kf is a great cpu. a 2500k is fine for web browsing (my parents pc has my old 2600k) but beyond that it is very slow. pc recycling centers junk anything older than 4th or 5th gen these days, so if you tried to donate it, it would literally get thrown into the trash. next gen will not make a huge difference, maybe 10% or so, and you'd have to suffer for another year with 2nd gen. there is no reason to wait with hardware as slow as yours. ddr5 is also very very cheap now, so it's a good time to buy. if you have a microcenter near you, even better, since you can probably get a mobo/cpu/ram for $350-400.

I'd get a 7800X3D. It seems like you like to keep your pc for a long time, and that one will definitelly serve you for years to come!

upgrade now, the 13600kf is a great cpu. a 2500k is fine for web browsing (my parents pc has my old 2600k) but beyond that it is very slow. pc recycling centers junk anything older than 4th or 5th gen these days, so if you tried to donate it, it would literally get thrown into the trash. next gen will not make a huge difference, maybe 10% or so, and you'd have to suffer for another year with 2nd gen. there is no reason to wait with hardware as slow as yours. ddr5 is also very very cheap now, so it's a good time to buy. if you have a microcenter near you, even better, since you can probably get a mobo/cpu/ram for $350-400.

Alder lake is also cheap and plentifully available. I replaced 16 cores of sandy bridge xeons with a i5-12400 and it's *so much faster* in every way.

I went from ivy bridge (3570k) to an 11600k and the improvement was huge. Ended up going to raptor lake a year later to keep up with my 4090. But really anything would be a huge upgrade.

My primary system is 10 years so I'm looking at the same kind of question right now. The thing is, anything you buy today will bea huge leap in performance forwards regardless. There is not that much gain between two generations and it depends vastly on application or OS capabilities what the actual performance gains are.

For example I just upgraded a 2 year old system from Pentium Gold to i5 with the same motherboard. There was a noticeable performance gain with one applications that is multihtreaded being 10x faster in one aspect of it, but other less optimised operations are only a little faster. Two generations of i5 you wouldn't see such a leapfrog of performance.