Back in Spring 2011, I bought a shiny i5-2500K (Sandy Bridge) for my gaming PC… and never looked back. I’ve never had to touch this sturdy, unrelenting CPU. I never even bothered figuring out how to overclock it (which maybe contributed to its longevity); it just always worked great, and kept on going and going and going.
However, when I realized my DDR3 RAM was no longer one but two generations out of date… I had to admit it was time to upgrade.
Obviously, Intel has earned my loyalty with the i5-2500k, and I’m not seriously looking at other CPU brands. I have my eye on a sexy little i5-13600KF with a nice new LGA1700 motherboard, and I fully expect that combo to last me another decade.
However, I’ve been out of this game for a long, long time. I seek your advice. Would I be a fool to buy now? When will the next generation be out? Is the next generation going to be leaps and bounds ahead of the current gen, or just an incremental improvement? Eight or nine years from now, am I going to feel like a chump for grabbing Raptor Lake when I could have waited a few more months for Arrow Lake?
Thank you in advance for your advice.
Cpu prices are good, ram prices are decent and storage prices also good. Generally a good time to make a purchase. There is always going to be something new coming that you could wait for. But it will be expensive at release so you need to wait 4-8 months for it to drop to more reasonable levels. By the time you reach that time period, you realise the new gen is coming soon so maybe wait for that… And the cycle goes on. Forget about the longevity of Sandy Bridge. That was an anomaly due to poor cpu performance progress during ~2012-2019 and certainly not the rule. Nowadays cpus can get outdated after 3-4 years depending on what you are doing.