Sandy Bridge: Setting Intel’s modern foundation
I still run an i7-3770k in my homelab (Ivy Bridge, the successor to Sandy Bridge, but still a relatively shared platform with backwards compat) and despite the fact that it's older than dirt it is still a pretty great processor to this day. Not too long ago it was powering my gaming rig and it held up really well to modern titles at 1080p.The best part is that I got it at a university surplus sale for $60, complete w/ a decent antec case, corsair psu, 16gb of ram and a decent Asus motherboard.