TheMagicalWallaby :
MostWantedSoulRider :
Hi OP,
I believe that you are strictly in gaming. Hence, I suggest you to stay with INTEL rather than jumping on AMD because FX processors have no future proof as the company is focusing over APU.
Here's the list of Intel processors (gaming-wise) you've might heard till now:
Intel i5 4590
Intel i5 4690
Intel i5 4670
Intel i7 4770
Intel i7 3770
If you don't want to kill your budget, then I would say to choose a lease expensive Intel processor which possesses a high single-core performance as it is required for high-end gaming. I would recommend i5-4690 (195$ approximate).
Reason: 4690's per core performance is far better than i7 4770, 3770, and 4670. With i5-4690, you can have your games running in your PC with silky-smooth performance. Hope it helped you. Have fun.
AMD might their FX lines as they have teased about it in pictures. Also, they are not focusing on APU's. They have their new steamroller CPU's in development. Their is a little bit more to come. the least expensive intel processor is also a bad choice. Once you get below the $200, AMD CPU's tend to dominate. Also I wouldn't get the 4690 because it has so little overclocking capabilities. He should get the k version if he gets one.
Thanks for your reply with valuable facts.
Steamroller is an architecture in APU.. Also, no matter how many cores the CPU has, per-core performance comes to the picture when gaming is necessary. An Universal truth to be accepted. Also, I've listed the processors in my above post which can perform very well in the real-time. "AMD might their FX lines as they have teased about it in pictures". Sometimes, people don't want '
might' coming up with their decisions. It should be a firm decision, either yes/no by the respective companies. As you said, their concentration is on Steamroller and I concur. Also, AMD is far away from Intel. And, If OP has mentioned about overclocking, I would have recommended K-version. In the meantime, the OP must have Z intel chipset board to overclock the processor. Taking the overall consideration of the OP, I stopped by non-k version. Correct me if I'm wrong.