At work I'm on I5 and I7 stuff and never use all that (I'm one of the few here on HN that isn't a programmer). At home, I was going to put in a 2600K at the la

At work I'm on I5 and I7 stuff and never use all that (I'm one of the few here on HN that isn't a programmer). At home, I was going to put in a 2600K at the last build but there was that whole chipset recall problem and I needed something in quick so I went back a generation and got the core2quad - 8 gig of ram. usage pattern is really office applications and a few specialized plot applications (Igor). after I added the SSD, and a newish video card the CPU is just not the problem. frankly.. there is no problem. so no incentive to upgrade. When I started using computers heavily in the 90's you were lucky to get a year out of a machine before it was just too slow to do the tasks you needed. For me, those days died when the P4 came out. Unless your super CPU bound like compiling - you just don't need it for basic office stuff.