Just curious, but why upgrade now? I understand you're likely tight on money but you're deciding to make an upgrade when intel is the most outrageous about their pricing.

And Im sitting here just happy with my 950. Which does 4.4 at 1.48v. I run it though at 4.1 @ 1.3v. 1st gen i7 still have alot of life left in them.

That they do; I felt the performance of them was very disappointing considering what they were, but they're still more than good enough for most purposes today. I'm in the same boat though - I'm sure with my FX-6300 I could get to at least 4.7Ghz stable with my current heatsink, but I don't need the extra performance and I'd rather keep power saving features on (except C1E). 4.4Ghz is still plenty of speed though - the only reason I care to upgrade is power efficiency. My computer spews a LOT of heat. When I retire this computer, I'm honestly considering overclocking it a little bit more, slap in a 3rd GPU, run stuff like folding@home, and use it as a "productive room heater" during the winter. If I'm going to pay for electric heat, I might as well do something useful with it.

My pc didnt output much heat at all even at 4.4 with HT on. It did once I dropped my second 7850 in and had to take my H60 off my single 7850. Even with ac on, you can feel the difference of 2 gpus. But my god the performance is frickin awesome with 2 gpus.

This is just the locked CPU we have a whole month or so to wait until the K based CPUs to be out. I also think it would be a great Idea for me to go z97 and go with the 4790k CPU from my lonely Core 2 Quad Q6600.

I think it largely depends on your heat dissipation. I designed my PC so there's a straight "tube" of airflow dedicated to just the CPU. The CPU heatsink is one that has a sideways-mounted fan, so air basically just passes straight through it. I can barely reach 55C, which is (IMO) impressive considering it's just air cooled and operating at 1.5v (maybe it was 1.45, I forget). So, basically all the heat generated is put into the room instead. My GPUs are set up similarly, but it's a lot more difficult to make a straight path of airflow for them. Anyway the point of me saying all of this is depending on how your airflow is set up, a lot of the heat could be trapped inside your system, so it doesn't heat up the room very much. Under full load, my current computer heats up a 12x12ft room about 1 degree F per hour.

Go second hand Sandy and cash in on the savings. z97/refresh performance won't be scaled enough to justify it's price unless they OC like absolute beasts which btw we haven't really seen much of lately...

Skylake for me because I want new architecture 😀

Id rather not do that because it might be more trouble than it is worth and besides any form of an upgrade for me would be a huge boost. If push comes to shove I might just get a Z97 board with the 4770K CPU so if broadwell is any thing amazing I can upgrade to that.

Makes sense but then again price to performance ratio compared to Sandy doesn't. Skylake is where the next big jump is at least then we get DDR4 to play with if everything else fails.

I honestly miss the years when a new generation of CPU/socket ment a significant jump, it was worth to upgrade, now... not so much.

wonder how the scores agains i7 920@ stock. I would love it for once people that do these reviews would put them up against 1st,2nd,3rd (gen) etc instead of putting them up again last gen or the one before only. Not everyone upgrades every year, there is no point half the time

I have 7 120mm fans in my pc. 1 intake in the front, 1 rear exhaust, 2 on the side door exhaust, and 2 on my h100 for intake and one on the bottom of the case for exhaust as well. My gpus do not have blower fans. So heat is dumped inside case. I love gpus with blower fans that push the heat out of the case. Dont see them on gpus as much anymore.