The system the i7-3770 replaced was a 4 year old dual-core, with (IIRC) just 1GB of RAM. The i7 was a dramatic improvement, but I don't feel that the Ryzen would be a dramatic improvement.

And that's the issue. It is not just me being a little unimpressed with current offerings, or me just being cheap. The issue is that there is even a valid discussion about replacing a 6 year old desktop. In the past, in the 1990's and 2000's, it wasn't a question. You had to upgrade because you wanted to run Windows XP decently, for example.

So if you can benefit from 8Cores (ie compiling for one) then it is a nice upgrade.

If you rarely utilize all 4 cores on your 3770 then it is a pointless upgrade.

That is the thing, going from a single core to 2 core pretty much benefited everyone. Heck PentiumHT was a big thing.

Going from 2 core to 4 cores took longer to show benefits and 4 cores to 8 cores is going to be slower still to show benefits for most users.

At the end of the day single core speed has been stagnating for the last 6 years every since Sandy Bridge which was the last big jump.

I mean I plan on buying AMDs ThreadRipper 2 32 core chip since it will be of benefit to me for running 100 copies of the same program.

Still those 32 cores will not help with regular computing.

True, but it is a major upgrade.

The i7-3770 supports two channels of DDR3-1600 memory, or 25.6 GB/s of memory bandwidth. A Ryzen processor (or other recent generation) supports DDR4-3200, which literally doubles your memory bandwidth. Fortunately or unfortunately, we now have much faster PCIe SSDs so memory bandwidth isn't as crucial for normal use, but a 100% improvement is a much better reason to upgrade than a measly 10% bump.