Intel’s quad-core, eight-thread Core i7-2600K came this close to cracking our Full Nerd podcast’s inaugural PC Hall of Fame and for damned good reason. The Sandy Bridge-era flagship delivered a near-perfect enthusiast experience for the time, piling on threads while simultaneously loading up spectacular single-thread performance—the opposite of Bulldozer, AMD’s disastrous rival CPU architecture. Sandy Bridge was significantly faster than what came before it.

And it overclocked like a beast too! Hang around forums long enough and you’ll undoubtedly run into old-timers waxing poetic about pushing the processor to 4.7GHz without breaking a sweat. The Core i7-2600K kicked so much ass that it still powers some gaming PCs eight long years about its debut.

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