Similar here. My main home machine's CPU held out for years more than previous ones had. I didn't do much by way of heavy dev/test/DB work in that period[†] so

Similar here. My main home machine's CPU held out for years more than previous ones had. I didn't do much by way of heavy dev/test/DB work in that period[†] so games were the only big processing it did[‡], and they only used a couple of cores properly or were bottlenecked at the GPU. I upgraded early last year because I was doing a bunch of video transcoding, something where going from 4 to 16 cores really helps, and had finally started to notice it bogging down more than a little elsewhere. There was a per-core performance bump too in this case, that R7 2700/x was excellent value for money at the time. Also there was a goodly increase in memory bandwidth with the new kit, to keep those cores' caches full of things to be getting on with, but again that wasn't a massive bottleneck for my other uses up to that point. [†] which I had previously, but personal dev has dropped off significantly since developing out-door habits (when you properly get into running it can be very time-consuming!) and day-job work is usually done via VPN+RDC when I do it at home. [‡] and even then I wasn't spending time & money on the bleeding edge, though I did upgrade to a 1060/6GB for those that were demanding more than my old GPU could give)