Prices of core system upgrade VS. performance gain...

[Akagi]

Is it just me or is upgrade value for money at an all time low at the moment? We are on a memory type changeover and the new chips are still following the same baby step performance increases... (though there has been a bit of a splash with the new i7 hex cores and Ryzen 7!) Both combined means it is incredibly expensive to get any satisfying increase in performance...

That said I guess it depends on your own personal circumstance and expectation!

Here's my point... I built my current core-system in 2011, six years ago... It consists of:

i7 2700K @ 5.0GHz
Asus P8Z68-V Pro
16GB Corsair Vengeance 1600MHz DDR3

It would cost me around £750 to upgrade to an i7 8700K with a decent board and 16GB of DDR4, or around £600 to upgrade to a Ryzen 5 1700 with a decent board and 16GB of DDR4.

At those kinds of prices, even if I had a tonne of money to chuck at my PC I would probably save it and spend a little bit on some faster DDR3, and try cranking the i7's overclock up a little bit more.

It just seems insane that after six years, my core system still seems perfectly adequate. Looking at that sort of time gap in the past, it was the difference between a Core 2 Duo and an Ivybridge i7, or a Pentium 4 Willamette and a Core 2 Quad!

 

[BaroUK2]

Considering there was no competition for Intel past 6 years its quite expected results, thats how Intel has always been....

We are still lucky we can overclock other wise we would have seen Intel releasing new processors in 100mhz increase xD

 

[TallPaul1878]

I wouldn't jump on a Coffee Lake i7 yet if I were you. You have a Sandy Bridge i7 and it's clocked very high. I just don't think you'd see a massive performance uplift.

Coffee Lake has launched on Z370 which is a stop gap until Z390. I know personally I'd want to be on the Z390 if I was dropping a tonne of cash so I'd wait it out and hope the new motherboards improve performance some more.