The Sandy Bridge chips were, and still are great for gaming.I had a 2600k for my first build ever and managed to get it to 5.0Ghz for daily use, it was great for emulation, maybe even better than my 5960X running at 4.5Ghz.It is really sad that a lot of software doesn't take advantage of newer chips, I've never seen my CPU go above 55% while gaming at 4K and multitasking at the same time, just imagine the possibilities if all 16 threads were used effectively or even 32 threads in a not so distant future.