What can Microsoft really do.
Offer Gabe billions of dollars, he already has more money than he could ever spend.
An IPO would probably earn Gabe more money than Microsoft is willing / able to pay anyway.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d6yBHDvKUw

I personally don't think that Gabe will sell Valve... but this argument is a bit flawed:

George Lucas also already had more money than he could ever spend. And if he had produced the new Star Wars movies himself, he would probably have earned more money than Disney was willing to pay him. Nevertheless he sold Lucasfilm to Disney.

So there have been precedences going against common sense.

I think you are missing the point.

Gabe clearly doesn't want to sell.
What can Microsoft do, to change his mind?
Simply offering money would very likely not work.

George Lucas probably didn't want Lucasfilms anymore.

Sorry, but we don't know that. Again you are stating an assumption as fact.

It were also possible that Gabe is acting that he doesn't want to sell until the deal is made and his NDA allows the announcement. Notch wasn't open about selling Mojang either... he even wrote that he was aware "this goes against a lot of what I’ve said in public".

And we don't know at what point "George Lucas probably didn't want Lucasfilms anymore". Was it before or after Disney made him an offer?

A slow CPU can hold back your load times if a game is doing allot of say... Decompression work on the CPU during loading.
But for the most part... It is storage that holds back load times.

Not only are SSD's vastly superior in sequential reads for loading... But doing lots of small random reads an SSD can be 100's of times faster than a mechanical disk. It makes a difference.

I keep my most played games on my SSD. The rest on a Western Digital Black.

When Gabe sells Valve/Steam, it will be for the same reason as Lucas: he's tired of all the problems related to running the company and wants to get rid of it. How close is Gabe to that point? Only he knows.

Trust me, you'll notice the upgrade from the very same moment you turn on your PC.

That said, I remember that your PC is a bit old, and I don't know if your motherboard will have an SATA 3 port to fully notice the extra speed of an SSD.

Trust JEMC, SSD's and other upgrades really do make a difference. I remember pre-2015, that my 2012 PC only ran with Western Digital green HDD's (which are one of the slowest types) and had no SSD. I ran with SSD's by 2015 and couldn't turn back. Having your OS on the SSD makes a huge difference with boot up time, as well as for games (provided you have an SSD for those, as games these days take up some chunk of space).

I wouldn't really install games on the same drive as your OS though. I learned that over the years with both my old SSD and HDD. 

http://image.ibb.co/hDxD9R/tess.png

RIP AMD.

Upgraded to an SSD last year, went from pressing the power button and waiting 3 minutes for my computer to finish loading windows and actually start running at a decent speed, to waiting 15 seconds.

He will still notice a difference despite running a Nahelem/Westmere based CPU.
Boards of that era typically ran with Sata 2, which topped out at 300MB/s. Higher-end boards though sometimes came with Sata 3 at 600MB/s.

A mechanical disk isn't going to max either interface out except for some specific burst scenario's. (I.E. Reading data directly from a mechanical disks Ram.) Most mechanical disks will top out at 150MB/s. Sometimes even less.

An SSD will still provide a substantual improvement... And the low access times will make everything stupidly snappy and responsive.