I’m considering upgrading my PC. Primarily, I play videogames. Sometimes I edit video, but not enough to orient my whole system around it. It would be nice if I could stream without having whatever game i’m playing drop to 25fps. I’ve got a budget limit of $1200 but would like to spend less than that. Here’s my current pc’s relevant part list:

Originally built in 2010, I upgraded the videocard, RAM, and SSD in 2013, and would like to re-use those parts since they’re not too slow or outdated by today’s standards. This seems like the absolute worst time to be buying processors though. If I were to upgrade today, the Intel 4790k is hands-down the beast I’d pick. The problem is that Intel has both a tock (Broadwell, a die shrink of Haswell) and a tick (Skylake, a new architecture) planned for release this summer.

Broadwell desktop sku’s are set to hit store shelves in late May, early June allegedly. Clock numbers were leaked recently and they’re pretty bad. Like going from Haswell’s 4.0ghz default/4.4 turbo to 3.3 default/3.8 turbo bad. They also seem to have lowered the L3 cache from 8mb to 6mb. While the real-world performance might shake out to be better in some specific situations (the integrated video on the Broadwell chips is supposed to be a lot nicer than the Haswell’s, and it’s got a significantly lower TDP), for high end systems with dedicated GPU’s, Broadwell looks like it’s going to be a flop.

The next architecture iteration, Skylake, is quite a bit more murky with the details. Big promises and high expectations abound, but very little concrete information has come out. We know that there are some configurations) that only support DDR4 memory, but most likely all of the desktop chips will support my DDR3 . The big relevant change is the new CPU socket. Skylake is gonna require the LGA 1151, and that means at least a few months of high priced motherboards until an ecosystem can develop, so even if they hit their announced August release date, we won’t even see desktop SKU’s popping up until September-October making Christmas 2015 the best time to buy.

So I guess I’m looking for people to speculate on the following questions:

• Do you think the introduction of Broadwell will significantly affect the price of Haswell chips and/or motherboards?
• Is it a good idea to buy the tried-and-true 4790k this late in its life cycle?
• Is the 5820K more “future proof” in any way because upcoming technologies like dx12 are supposed to have better multi-core support?
• Is there any indication Skylake will be released on the target date and/or live up to all the marketing grandeur?
• Seriously, what the fuck, my 5 year old processor is a 4 core 3.4 ghz, why are they still releasing 4 core 3.3 ghz processors as flagship?