i5 vs i7

[Crystal Clear]

i5 4690k or i7 4790 non k for gaming? Not sure if I plan on overclocking depending on the speeds.

 

[geofelt]

If the $100 price delta is not a problem, buy the i7-4790K.
At stock 4.0/4.4 it will run faster than the 4690K. Hyperthreads will not be that useful.

Since this is a new gaming build, I suggest you consider a i5-6600K if you are willing to do a bit of overclocking.
I changed from a i7-4790K to a i5-6600K with a nice overclock and am very please. My rationale was that I saw that my games depended on fast cores and that the 8 threads of the i7 were not being used.
The 6600K overclocks nicely, runs cool and has better performance per clock.

Ultimately, the Z170 chipset will open the doors to using much faster ssd devices which will be here next year.

 

[zAustin]

If you're doing just gaming, with no intention of doing multimedia, go with the i5 and save $100 towards a better GPU. Not enough games nowadays utilize more than 4 cores to justify buying one primarily for gaming, and the ones that do have minuscule differences. At this point, I would have to agree with getting a 6600K since the Z170 chipset does take advantage of the new DDR4 memory, and it's simply the newest platform so it will be around for a while, not really sure how much longer the 1150 socket CPU's will last. Could last another several years, could start getting phased out next year. However, it was a successful chipset, so I would assume it will be around a little bit longer if you decide to go with 1150.

 

[synphul]

There isn't a huge performance difference between the skylake and haswell (6600k vs 4690k) cpu's. Ddr4 is being adopted but is still stuck on dual channel architecture. Either will work well. The op mentioned the 4790, specifically the non k. The increased speed out of the box is for the 4790k. The 4790 runs 3.6ghz (4ghz turbo) while the 4690k runs 3.5ghz (3.9ghz turbo). That particular i5 can be oc'd, the 4790 cannot and aside from the 100mhz difference the only other differences for the price are the 2mb cache and hyperthreading. Hyperthreading does little to nothing for games, there may be 1 or 2 that show any benefit and that's very little.

I would agree, save the money and put it toward a better gpu. Faster hard drives have little to no impact to games other than loading between levels and since there's no fps gain going from hdd to ssd there's certainly no compulsion to go from slower ssd to faster ssd. Ddr4 could come in handy down the line if for nothing else, availability. If ddr3 becomes hard(er) to obtain like ddr2 has at some point, having ddr4 may be beneficial. Technically the 1150 sockets are 'outdated' because of skylake's 1151, which will be outdated after skylakes successor same as previous intel motherboard sockets. Motherboards haven't lasted multiple generations for years so best to just buy the board that suits your build and consider it a pairing with a cpu rather than a permanent or long life part of a build. It won't last several cpu upgrades, hasn't with sandy/ivy, haswell/broadwell nor skylake/? (not sure if it will be cannonlake or kaby lake or what).