I.....guess......

Exact cpu I have. I really should overclock it though. Been running stock for almost 5 years. Been tempted to upgrade ram and gpu and maybe adding an ssd but never thought of replacing the 2500k.

They are seriously easy to overclock. I got mine to 4.5Ghz stable with no voltage adjustment.

One thing to consider too is that software development has been lagging behind the hardware advancements. Most software still doesn't innately take advantage of multi-threading as much as it could. However, since the smartphone boom, new programming techniques have been applied to asymmetric multi-core CPU's (which are more complex than symmetric ones), and a lot of these techniques are moving their way into other applications. More and more programmers are also becoming better equipped with concurrency skills than in the past, which makes the costs of employing said programmers less as the skill becomes more common. Game AI, game physics, and complicated rule-based algorithms will probably benefit much more than graphics from these advancements though.

I think there is this illusion as well still that SSD's are things which cost a lot for small amounts of space, here in Ireland at least can get

http://www.komplett.ie/kingston-ssdnow-v300-240gb/80009970/details.aspx

or

http://www.komplett.ie/kingston-ssdnow-v300-480gb/20220206/details.aspx

So yeah, 90/160euro for 240/480gb of SSD goodness. It was the 240gb version of that I bought myself a year ago, Don't think I could ever go back to a magnetic disk drive for my OS.

Good to know! Thanks!

Kinda depressing PC tech has stagnated so much. This whole multi core stuff still doesn't seem to pay off, or maybe it's Windows that sucks. Why does my laptop struggle so much while multi tasking if the i7 quad core cpu is always below 20% utilized.
I remembered being amazed by how fast everything was when buying a new pc or laptop. That hasn't been the case in the last 5 years. Still same slow. Especially when trying to browse vgchartz with a game running in another window.
At least GPUs are still getting better.

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.

I think a lot of it has to do with developers not utilizing features and multi-threading the way they could. The hardware performs a lot better than most are willing to exploit for the added cost and time But, yeah, I agree with you.

That and the console friendly industry turn we''ve seen in the past decade, along with technical aspects, there are also a lot of atrocious interfaces and menu systems in modern games and many ports are very cheap and poorly made.

Nowadays we aren't advancing that much. besides shading, resolution, and so on, a PC can now last longer.