Regarding CPU steppings?

It would if you knew thered be perf increases down the road, which theres no gaurantee of

Steppings make a big difference mostly in voltages and keeping your cpu stable along with temps. Not necessarily meaning that your going to get a better overclock cause you could get a bad chip.

Usually what they do is loosen the timings so that the cpu is just a tadbit slower at stock but benefits when overclocked.

Also, I personally don't think it's worth waiting since the new steppings take a while to be released.

You can always sell the cpu for about the same price if it doesn't take too much of a price hit and you can always get another one with the better stepping when it comes out.

New stepping doesn't always mean it's going to be better.

A new stepping can mean one or more of the following (but sometimes none):

- Higher maximum clock speed.
- More energy efficient.
- Some new instructions (like SSE...).
- Bug fixes (although rare in processors, they do happen).

The change will not be massive as if it was they would give it a whole new name, but can still be worth waiting if it's only a matter of a few weeks or so. But since new steppings come out all the time it's not worth waiting like 6 months because another new stepping will be anounced and you'll wait another 6 months and so on, and never actually ever get around to buying a new CPU.

Theres almost always bug fixes going on, but theyre minor fixes

You won't get new instructions in a stepping without a name change. Or at least I can't recall an Intel case where that happened.