Just checked my email. I bought an i2500k w/Asus P67 motherboard in January 2011 for $310 total. Still in my machine now 5 years later at 4.4Ghz and I can't find a reason to upgrade. 5 years!
CPU's are all ridiculous deals now that they last forever. Whatever money we are losing on garbage GPU deals lately is made up on CPU's we never have to upgrade.
:thumbsup: And now if Intel gives us i7-6800K @ $389 and i7-6900K octa-core for $599, just imagine how long those CPUs will last? If Intel switches to the Tick (2015)-Tock (2016) -Tock (2017) model, then it's going to take 3 years just to get to the next new architecture (Icelake in 2018) and that one is lucky to have a 15% IPC over 2015 Skylake.
Luckily I am near a MC. I just picked one up. Really happy with it, got one of the better overclockers.
Congrats! It's now showing
$249.99, another $10 lower than the OP's listed price. MC's price on the i7 6700K is $359.99. $110 or 44% more expensive for like 5-8% more performance.
I don't think Microcenter is quite as good now as a few years ago on processor pricing, but really you couldn't get it anywhere cheaper so they could really only get worse.
It might not be as good as before but compared to prices for the rest of the world....
Saying stores are full of old junk is probably due to the slow/sporatic release of Broadwell and Skylake rather than anything the store is doing.
i7 4790K is not old junk though. i7-6700K is barely better.
NCIX dropped the price by $100 CDN and hitting F5 shows they have 186 units left. That's pretty large overstock if you ask me. Artificially raising prices on Skylake while clearing old Haswell CPUs is probably a good idea since soon they won't have enough Haswell compatible motherboards which would make it pretty hard to sell those CPUs stand-alone.