I have been planning for a new build with either Sky Lake or Kaby Lake. However, very recent events have made me fiscally conservative. Coupled with this is the fact that I built a computer a year ago that was because of my enthusiasm and zeal, ridiculously powerful for everyday media use. I am thinking of just adding a few fans, an 850 Evo SSD and my Titan black gpu.

However, the CPU is a 4670K, the predecessor to the 4690K. The question is, will that processor allow me to not bottleneck to any degree, and be viable for present/near future gaming?. I do believe in headroom

Short answer: You will be fine with that processor. I don't think it's possible to completely avoid bottleneckin', there will always be CPU-hungry games, badly optimized console ports and so on. If you want headroom, go with an Intel i7 Extreme or take a look at Xeon processors, but they can be bottlenecked too and performance/$ is probably not justified for games. But they can make a difference if you play very CPU-heavy games while streaming, or want to play Arma 3 with 325 AI units at the same time. But in those cases I would rather recommend a second streaming computer instead. And for Arma run it on a server and add one or more headless clients to help with AI instead.

@bybeach: I run a 4670k (coupled with a 980ti) and the only performance issues I'm getting with the modern, graphically intensive stuff are ones which are affecting people with more powerful PCs than me: ie, the shitty ports. I'd say it's got a couple of years left in it as a powerful CPU, at least.

I have it overclocked to 4.2ghz.

Thank you guys. Both answers got me to probably what I needed to hear. My concern was that with the new demands of gaming, I would be keeping myself in the same relative hole as I am now with the i7 950 I have in my present gaming computer, rather than getting the latest gen. I do need to spend a little time and grasp overclocking

I will keep this open a while longer to hear anything else that will educate me, but it seems a go to just use my alternate PC that I got carried away with for it's intended purpose

You're probably looking at $500+ for a Skylake/Kaby Lake CPU + compatible motherboard + DDR4 memory, fwiw. Say what you want about modularity of PC upgrades, those three components are pretty tightly coupled, and in your case in particular the socket on your board won't match a current/next-gen CPU, nor is your new motherboard likely to match your current memory. My recent build was an i5 6600K, a middle of the road Z170 board, and 2x8GB of 3200MHz DDR4 (which was a teensy bit more expensive than the standard 2133MHz stuff) and those components alone set me back ~AU$700.

Understood @fnrslvr. That's what I was going to do, the whole 9 yards. The Kaby Lake wants, (if not needs) a synced MB, even though it is still a 1151. Something about a 200 series?. Anyways, the difference to going all out/new build just did not make sense to me, if in effect I could do just some hundreds of dollars to a computer I already over-built and hardly use. But, with a titan black...lets say a 1080 for comparison, I wanted someone to tell me I could skip the latest gens, and do high/ultra with the 4670K. I'm willing to learn what I already should know how to do, overclock the cpu.

@bybeach: It seems like the 170 boards are getting firmware updates for Kaby Lake CPUs. I believe ASUS and ASRock have already delivered BIOS updates for most of their boards. That said, you're probably aware of this but your board doesn't support Skylake either.

I'm not familiar with all the benchmarking and whatnot, but my impression is that your current CPU won't hold back a 1080. Of course, overclocking would help, but even that's something I wouldn't do until I had to. I haven't even thought about overclocking my Skylake CPU, aside from just curiosity about how much I can squeeze out of it -- I just got the unlocked CPU now because I didn't want to wind up paying big for one a few years down the track to support my current board, and it looks like the unlocked CPUs hold their value very stubbornly precisely because people who don't want to upgrade CPU+board+memory want them.

I'm satisfied with what I have read. I hate value moves, but what I have read convinces me to make one. Maybe 4 years down the road for a new pc, unless I have other needs. Thank you all!