Have i9-11900K, does everything I need it to do. People who don’t need a computer for work and upgrade every year or two baffle me.

Have you considered that the vast majority of users don’t use their computers primarily for gaming?

If it’s soldered to the board, as much as you can afford

Quit watching YouTube videos about performance benchmarks and go play some games with your overpowered system, man. And turn off stat monitoring, it’s messing with your anxiety. Your PC is among the top 1% worldwide.

Hmmmm I find that Intel CPUs going back at least 6 generations hold their value when compared to AMD. I don’t know if that’s due to iGPU or consumer sentiment. Best price to performance in the last few cycles has always been 2 generation old CPUs on sale on Black Friday. For example i5-12600K is now $153 and 12700K is $211. i3s and i5s in the past 6 gens, K and non-K, all hover around the $100+ price point used and not uncommon to see them go $130+. So your best price to performance is actually a K chip, at least for the next 3-4 days. If you’re sorride about power draw, you can always manipulate power limits in BIOS, as well as turn Turbo Boost off.