there's a dedicated hardware thread, expect this to be moved... maybe. But since you ask, normally people replace CPU and motherboard at the same time, since (specially so with Intel) chipsets have a limited shelf life.
Your CPU might not be new anymore but it's a frigging 4-core, 8-thread CPU. It can max out games like TW3 and pretty much any video card out there right now. We previously commented on so called "CPU bottlenecks" and how often they are not what people think they are. You 3770K will not bottleneck anything. Bottlenecking means mantaining the same output (performance) with more resources, for instance going from a GTX 570 to a 970 with the same framerate. More modern CPU's may yield slightly better overall performance, but at the moment it wouldn't be worth it. If you want to upgrade within a year or so, wait for Skylake or whatever comes next.
Good point. That said I use my rig for more than just gaming. I study game art & design and I work with stuff like Unreal 4, Zbrush and Maya. So far I haven't noticed any real issues, though testing stuff in Unreal 4 can sometimes be taxing unless I make a build of the project and run that. Zbrush can sometimes push my rig to it's limits too when I work on high-detail sculpts.
I do notice my CPU bottlenecking with Guild Wars 2 though. I'm not sure if it's the game that's poorly optimized or indeed the CPU, but whenever I'm in huge group fights my FPS drops like mad. I used to run Guild Wars 2 with a GTX 660 Ti, I upgraded to a GTX 970 4GB a few months ago and didn't notice any performance upgrade in Guild Wars 2, I still get the same low framerates during the group fights.
Edit: The Witcher 3 runs perfectly though, all I had to go was turn off Hairworks to get 60FPS most of time time, the rest on Ultra.
If you're curious, here is my entire rig:
(I don't know why it says that my CPU runs at 3,5Ghz and my RAM at 666Mhz, it's supposed to be 4,5Ghz and 1333Mhz.)
Anyway, where can I find the hardware thread?
