Greentext

It's easy to go too far in either direction instead of just doing what fits your needs (which in fairness, can sometimes be difficult to precisely pin down). Blindly going "it's old, I need to upgrade" or "it still runs, it's not worth upgrading" will sometimes be right but it's not exactly tailored advice.

Someone I know was holding out for ages on a 4790K (2014), and upgraded a year or two ago to a then-current-gen system and said the difference it made to their workflow was huge - enough that they actually used that experience to tell their boss at work that the work systems (similar to what they had had themselves) should get upgraded.

At the end of 2022 I had had my current monitor(s) for about 10 years and had spent years of hearing everyone saying "wow upgrading my monitor was huge", saying that either 1440p was such an upgrade over 1080p and/or that high refresh rate (120+Hz) was such an upgrade over 60Hz. I am (or at least was in the past) a pretty competitive player in games so you'd think I'd be a prime candidate for it, but after swapping from a 60Hz 1200p screen to a 144Hz 1440p screen for my primary monitor I... honestly could barely notice the difference in games (yes, the higher refresh rate is definitely enabled, and ironically I can tell the difference easily outside of games lol).

I'm sensitive to input latency, so I can (or at least could, don't know if I still can) easily tell the difference between the responsiveness of ~90 FPS and ~150 FPS in games, so it's extra ironic that pumping the refresh rate of the screen itself didn't do much for me.