When will my 2500K box need an upgrade?

Level1Techs INBOX.deb
1

When I built my computer in 2012, Ivy Bridge was about to be coming out but I went with a Sandy build for the great overclocking potential. As a result I was expecting to get around 4-5 years out of it (since Sandy release Q1 2011). Which I figured would be when 4K becomes main stream. 

At the current rate, it seems like I am going to get many more years than I anticipated as there really hasn't been that much of an increase in what games demand, 4K rollout is taking forever, and there hasn't been much that has changed in terms of meaningful standards. PCI 3.0 has come out, but that doesn't offer much at this time. DDR3 is still great. Newer version of Intel CPUs don't offer much improvement. Is it fair to think I could potentially get 7-10 years out of this box (with a GPU upgrade around year 6, 7, or even 8 for 4K)?

I'm running a 2500k in a Asus P8Z68-V Pro/Gen 3 board with 16GB DDR3-1600. Additionally I am running a GTX 670 and two Crucial M4 SDDs in RAID 0.

2

With a good OC on that CPU and a new GPU every few years (The 670 is still a beast) you'll be fine. 

3

+1. Personally, I'd expect to upgrad the graphics card probably 2 or 3 times within the 7-10 years, as you suggested.

Although, I do think that more powerful graphics cards in the future might start bottlenecking on Pci-e 2.0.

4

in the future yes, but even now there's little to no difference, when we start to see unified memory acces to ram (amd with hsa and nvidia with cuda 6 compute -currently on 5) maybe we will start to se the benefits of pcie 3 and ddr4 and even maybe the ram will be between the gpu and the cpu for minimun latency... all of this it's just crazy speculation, and if it happens I won't expect to be massive until 2020... but again it's my personal speculation  based on the born of HSA and what nvidia says with cuda 6

 

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/16/nvidia_reveals_cuda_6_joins_cpugpu_shared_memory_party/

 

soooo.. with a little oc you have a nice cpu for the next 5-6 years IMHO...

5

Here's to Skylake

6

I have a 2500k @ 4.5ghz, I love it. It does everything I ask of it, that said I would like to have more threads/cores. Not for gaming, for gaming I expect the 2500k to outlast pcie 2.0, meaning its got a good bit of life in it. My only thing with the 2500k is because I am a programmer more threads/cores would make my stuff compile quicker. For example while my 2500k overclocked beats my brother's stock 8320 for gaming it can compile code faster.   if haswell -e realls have 8 core 16 thread cpus and its not the $1000 model only I will likely change then, for normal people I would suggest everyone wait until at least skylake.