Crazy to upgrade from Sandy Bridge to Sandy Bridge now?

[SimStin]

I put a computer together about two or three years ago. I have a Pentium G860 LGA1155, a Radeon HD7770 on a B75 board. It's been doing it's job (some gaming, everyday office work) very well. I can still play what I like to play, and it looks and feels good to me (I don't care if there is a higher graphics setting). I don't usually play the latest shooters, but now Fallout 4 is around the corner, and I will want to play that.

Here is my question: Within the LGA1155 category, there is still plenty of room for performance improvement. Would it be totally stupid to upgrade to a faster processor within the Sandy Bridge architecture? My rationale is this: I could spend a lot of money on a new board, CPU, memory, and video card to upgrade to Skylake. Or I could spend $300 and just get an i5 LGA1155 processor and a better video card.

Would that buy me a couple more years? Besides the vastly improved USB and PCIe, is there anything else I totally and absolutely want in the Skylake architecture?

 

[glamdringfh]

It might buy you 2 years tops before you would be wanting to upgrade to Skylake. I personally would recommend waiting and putting that money towards a good Skylake build. If it helps, here is a good article on Tom's specifically talking about upgrading from Ivy to Skylake:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/faq/id-2752766/skylake-upgrade.html

 

[Supahos]

You should be able to put an ivy bridge processor in that board if you update the bios a 3550 or 3770 would be a big upgrade for you

 

[SimStin]

Thanks for these comments! Yes, sorry, i should have said Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge. Anything that would let me keep the current memory and board.

I guess I could start by upgrading the video card to something really nice and see what that does now. Then, in a year or so, I could pull the board, CPU, and memory.

Maybe am overthinking this and should just spend the money now. It's not so much that I am unable to spend the money on new shiny components; it's that I don't want to. I love the idea of using hardware that's a generation or two old. When I stopped playing video games a lot in the late 90s, hardware was outdated the moment you left the store. Today, there are components that are 5 or more years old and are still perfectly fine. Like the HD6850 (I think that's the one). Sure, it runs hot, and it uses more power than a small factory, but it gets the job done. Or old ISP panels. Or my Pentium CPU. I just find that fascinating.

 

[synphul]

I think actual benchmarks of skylake vs ivy bridge show something different than a hopeful 30% ipc improvement. In cinebench it was an 18% difference from skylake's i5 to ivy's i5. In frybench it was an 8.5% improvement. Espresso transcoding was a 14% improvement.
http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/core_i5_6600k_processor_review_desktop_skylake,10.html

Cinebench r15 shows an 8.3% improvement from ivy to skylake.
http://www.eteknix.com/intel-core-i7-6700k-i5-6600k-skylake-processors-review/9/

The only time there's a roughly 28% improvement is in handbrake.

A 5.8% improvement in a heavily overclocked skylake i5 vs ivy i5 at stock in firestrike.
http://www.eteknix.com/intel-core-i7-6700k-i5-6600k-skylake-processors-review/12/

Blender and ms office productivity do show a 30% improvement but are the exception, not the rule.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/skylake-intel-core-i7-6700k-core-i5-6600k,4252-7.html

I think it's more important to consider what tasks the op will actually be doing, compare those to hard numbers then determine if the additional cost is worth it. There will be some added benefit to going with the newer platform but will mean a new cpu, motherboard and ram which will easily cost $450 just to get a cpu upgrade going to skylake. More around $475-480 if you include the required aftermarket cooler if they don't already have one (based on the cost of a 212 evo or cryorig h7).

 

[SimStin]

Thanks for your input!