That i7-4770 is a great processor (though it's 4c8t, not 8c); I actually still have an i5-3570k running in my HTPC/little gaming rig and it too is ticking along

That i7-4770 is a great processor (though it's 4c8t, not 8c); I actually still have an i5-3570k running in my HTPC/little gaming rig and it too is ticking along just fine. For my money, the Ivy Bridge and Haswell processors are the best bang-for-the-buck for processors, ever. The one note I'd add about CPUs is that they've gotten a lot wider over the last couple years. IPC has changed iteratively (AMD's has changed a lot though, particularly for Zen 2) but parallelism really has improved many workloads over time. Ryzen made it a lot easier to throw 8 cores/16 threads at a problem and for a lot of stuff folks around here are likely to care about that matters a good bit. And Ryzen 2 makes it downright affordable to throw 12c/24t at a problem. (He said, getting ready to throw down on a 3900X for video encoding...)