was gifted an i5 2500k

[puffpants]

I'm wanting to building a gaming computer and i was gifted a lightly used i5 2500k and wanted to know should i sell it or get a newer cpu. If i should stick with the 2500k I would want to over clock it. What motherboard should I get that would easily support overclocking? everything I have found has pointed me to the "ASRock Z77 Extreme4 ATX LGA1155 Motherboard" But its price is a bit high. If anything could deliver the same performance but at a lower cost what would it be? If i got a GTX 970 would the 2500k bottleneck it and limit frames in games such as witcher 3? If so I would want to sell the 2500k. what would be an upgrade to the 2500k?
Thanks

 

[MarkW]

Those were really good overclocking CPU's. I personally would keep it, and I would only overclock it if you decided that the CPU was not going fast enough to keep your video card happy. I highly suspect that it will keep your video card quite happy without overclocking.

The one reason you might want to sell it is that it only has PCIe 2.0 support. Newer CPU's have PCIe 3.0 support, and while its not a big deal for video cards today, it could become one at some point.

 

[tical2399]

Ok so be prepared for the standard toms response of "get newest thing". That out of the way, the 2500k is still a beast and nobody really NEEDS a stronger CPU than that. Its not gonna hold back most gpus at stock even heavy hitters like titan x will only require a small oc to eliminate bottlenecks if it even bottlenecks at all at stock.

 

[Sapphire Thunder]

The i5 2500k, when overclocked, is still fine cpu.
GTX 970 won't really get bottlenecked by it.

I would say that use it for now and upgrade to Skylake Refresh cpu in 2017.

 

[pasow]

clock by clock, haswell's only around 25% faster. so with a decent overclock you can achieve the same performance as a new part and sandy bridge processors overclocked like no processor sense (hitting 5GHz was common back in the day). i presently have a 2500k on a ASUS Z68 motherboard paired with a GTX980 and im only few frames slower in my averages than the benchmarks, but i could OC higher if i desired (i have a pretty lax 4.2GHz OC).

 

[dudeman509]

Still a great CPU - get a decent cooler and have fun.