Is it worth upgrading from a i5-2500 (non-K version) to Skylake?

[amsga]

I've been using my i5-2500 based PC for the past 4 years.

I was wondering if it is worth it to upgrade to Skylake.
I haven't read much about it or the reviews of the corresponding motherboards.

Could anyone provide any first hand experiences if you have done so?

 

[Supernova1138]

I upgraded to Skylake from the generation before Sandy Bridge, so I saw a fairly big performance jump in more CPU bound games. Sandy Bridge was the last major performance bump Intel made before starting the incremental <10% gain per release cycle while focusing all their efforts on the integrated graphics. In benchmarks, Skylake is roughly 20% faster clock for clock than Sandy Bridge, so not a huge improvement, but not utterly insignificant either. Skylake can offer a bigger performance boost over what you have now if you buy an unlocked CPU and a Z170 board and overclock it.

As for whether you should spend the money to upgrade, that will depend on what you're doing with the computer. If you're just gaming and you're not playing anything that is so CPU intensive that it needs an Intel chip overclocked to 4.5GHz for optimal performance, you're probably better off sticking with what you have for the at least the next year or so, possibly more if AMD's Zen doesn't upset the apple cart in any way. If you're doing stuff that benefits from an i7's hyperthreading, eg. video editing and encoding, then upgrading to a Skylake i7 would offer a bigger boost, though finding a Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge i7 would be a cheaper alternative. If you have a P67 or Z68 motherboard, you could look at getting an unlocked Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge CPU and overclock that for a cheaper performance boost.

The other reason to upgrade to Skylake would be new chipset features offered on Z170, such as better support for M.2 SSDs and support for NVMe storage, which would be useful to have if you want to get into really high speed storage.