Just like most of you reading this, I used to subscribe to the wisdom that “6 cores are enough for most people”. Until 2022, I had only ever used CPUs with up to 6 cores, nothing more. What changed that year was that I got the opportunity to get a fully paid-for PC courtesy of Nvidia and WD, so I got carried away. I let temptation trump logic, and splurged a big portion of the prize money on the Ryzen 7 5700X. An 8-core chip isn’t the most powerful thing you can buy, but I sure hoped to see some tangible improvements. However, I was sorely disappointed.