Is it worth upgrading my 3570K?

[Jonathanese]

I got the i5 3570K the month it came out, and have been running it at 4.6GHz. 16GB of DDR3 and an SSD.

Now, I don't feel like I need to upgrade or anything. But I was just thinking of how long I've had this processor, yet it still seems to hold up after the 4XXX, 5XXX, and now 6XXX. I keep thinking "man, it's been a while. maybe I'm due for an upgrade".

It is just really strange. I remember having my Athlon XP rendered obsolete by the Athlon 64 3000+ I got later, which was rendered incapable by the Core 2 Duo I got after that. And then this i5 was an enormous jump as well. But now, it seems like not much has changed in 3 generations.

Has CPU power slowed down a lot these past few years? Or are there big gains to be had by upgrading to newer chips?

 

[Gam3r01]

Not much is changing these days. Haswell to Skylake was only 10-15% increased performance.
I wouldnt bother upgrading the 3570k, maybe a new GPU or something, but not that processor.

 

[Jonathanese]

Yeah, that's what I thought.

I was thinking about this because I was considering getting a GTX 1080 when board partners start releasing their own. (STRIX 1080 anyone?) I might just stick with my 970, since that is plenty of power. I would just feel better with a larger frame buffer, and I would want a major GPU jump rather than I minor bump.

GPU aside (since this is a CPU thread).

It seems like RAM amount and bandwidth hasn't mattered much anymore, either. I have 8GB on my laptop and 16GB on my desktop, and have difficulty using much of it short of having a RAM Drive. Though Minecraft really loves its RAM. Just the other day my PC hard-reset because the RAM usage jumped to 10GB, then 13GB, then 15GB, then warnings, then system reset. Perhaps a memory leak.

 

[Gam3r01]

RAM really does not benefit you unless you have an explicit need for it. Im fine with 8 gigs (Pushed 7.2 on Plansetside 2 with skype and some chrome windows open). Now if you were to be rendering or similar, more ram would be useful.
Speeds are starting to come into play in certain titles (like Fallout 4) but generally ehh

 

[synphul]

I think you'll be fine with your current cpu. As far as gpu, a 1080 might make sense if you're gaming at 1440p or considering 4k. Otherwise for 1080 gaming see how your 970 does or consider the 1070. From what I understand the 1070 is supposed to be just slightly stronger than a titan x, several models stronger than the 970 and has 8gb vram.

You'd do better to wait on the cpu upgrade, maybe consider the next chipset/socket after skylake/1151 so you're not stuck replacing the mobo and cpu more times than necessary. Most boards are only lasting 2-3 gens and at least one of those will just be an efficiency bump with another a slight performance increase in a refresh release.