I remember upgrading to a 3600 from a i5-3470, the difference was massive. Then upgraded again to the 5800x3D. Thanks AM4.

all of these processors were utterly wiped out by the “spend $100 more on a 8700K and overclock” option.

There is such a thing as false economy, sometimes spending more money results in a thing that lasts long and gives better results throughout that whole timespan… classic “boots theory” stuff.

Having your $2000 build last 2-3 years less than it otherwise could have because you didn’t spend $100 more on the 8700K when you had the option to, is stupid, and not good value. Reviewers over-fixated on the minmaxing, the order of the day was “cut out everything else and shunt it all into your GPU”, some reviewers took it as far as saying you should cut down to a 500W PSU or even less. And today that $100 extra you spent on your GPU is utterly wasted, while going from a 8600K to 8700K or buying a PSU that doesn’t cut out on transient loads got you a much better system in the long term, even if it didn’t win the benchmarks on day 1.

(and yes, transients were already problematic back then, and in fact have remained pretty constant at around 2x average power draw…)