How much benefit you’ll see from upgrading depends to some extent on how much multi-threading your typical games or applications use and how old your current chip is. Intel’s decision to boost core counts across all three desktop CPU segments–the Core i3 also gets two cores and loses Hyper-Threading for a 4C/4T configuration–makes this an attractive time to buy. If you have a Core i7-2600K, the “2” means this CPU is a second-generation Core i7 CPU, aka Sandy Bridge. If you aren’t sure what generation of Intel CPU you have, the first digit of the four-digit model code is the model number. The overall price of CPUs in these segments has still come down on a per-core basis, and the performance boost from the additional cores is often worth it. Intel’s eighth-generation CPUs are generally more expensive than the CPUs they replace, though this varies somewhat.
