I'd settle for a competitive upper-mid range with similar power envelope. That said, I haven't felt "pain" using a computer since I switched to SSDs a number of years ago, last non-ssd was a Core 2 Duo E6600. Followed by i7-860[1], then an AMD FX-8350 and now an i7-4790K I've been very happy with.
Thinking of going to dual UHD (4K) displays from my dual 1080p next year, which will mean a video card update... May try to hold out on a CPU/system upgrade for a 5 year cycle this time though... I've tended to go with an upper-mid-range system every 2-3 years.
> Thinking of going to dual UHD (4K) displays from my dual 1080p next year, which will mean a video card update...
Do you do any gaming? If so you'll definitely need to pony up for a high-end card at 4k.
I'm in the 1440p (x2) camp for now (got QNIX monitors off ebay for ~<300 a pop) and will hold out until 4k displays reach that price. Though I'd trade 4k for 1440p @ 120Hz.
Gonna hold out on GPU upgrades until the next generation of cards (after Polaris) comes out and drives prices down some more
Not much, though Overwatch looks interesting... I don't game much at all. Mostly software development, and casual browsing, I just want the extra space.
Thinking of going to dual UHD (4K) displays from my dual 1080p next year, which will mean a video card update... May try to hold out on a CPU/system upgrade for a 5 year cycle this time though... I've tended to go with an upper-mid-range system every 2-3 years.
[1] http://frugalcoder.us/post/2010/03/07/new-computer-2010.aspx