Hello everyone!

My overclocking and gaming urges are slowly getting the best of me.

I have been out of the game for a long time and hoping that I could get some help regarding this decision.

I am trying to get the processor with the best performance for gaming.

The only real performance challenge the processor would get is gaming sessions for a few hours every now and then.

The old prommy is currently not upgraded, but may be in the future.

A used 2500k or 3570k seem to be the best performance for their price.

Which one would give the best performance of the two? Am I missing a better option for less or the same money?

From what I can understand Ivy often achieves higher frequency with extreme cooling, but this is with LN2 and my old prommy is no way near that temperature.

How are the yields with 3570k compared to 2500k?

Were the cold bug with 2500k only in the beginning? I see an awful lot of them above 5.5ghz on hwbot.

How does the 2500k vs. 3570k compare frequency wise with all cores running stable on the rather weak phase-change cooling that a Prommy is?

Am I missing any other parameter for gaming performance other than IPC and clock between the 2500k and 3570k?

Does one or the other degrade faster even though run properly cold?

I have also read that a lot of Ivy bridge cpus degrade and loose memory channels by being run without IHS. Is this true on single stage phase-change as well?

Thank you in advance for the help and sincere apologies for any foolish questions or wrong postings. I have been out of the game for too long .