What meaningful upgrades are there from an I5 2500k?

I'm rather fed up with the performance of my I5 2500k, it can't keep up with my needs for rendering, server hosting and even sometimes gaming. All of the "upgrade" options I've looked at are either stupendously expensive or offer an indeterminate step in performance.

I preferably need a large number of cores to handle as many of these things as possible at the same time within a £400 budget. As far as I can see so far it may be a far stretch.

 

Recommendations strongly appreciated!

    ~pipnina

Why not just get a 3770k? Use the 2500k as a server or something like that.

Thats because there hasn't been much percor performance boost since the i5 and if you only have that budget to spend the i7 is the only thing you can upgrade to. a 3770k is about the only option you have, maybe if you can find an older 2600k or 2700k but those wont be as much of an upgrade.

http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/pSJS if you can replace the motherboard you can do this. The 8 core 8350 is a beast for a home server/rendering machine.

You can always throw a E3 xeon like this in there if you want to. They are meant for server and rendering use http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/part/intel-cpu-bx80637e31275v2