I think I've decided on grabbing the FX 6350 when I (finally) upgrade my computer. It's just a hair slower than the 4670K in multi-threaded tasks, and only costs $130 while the 4670K is $220-240 depending on whether there's a sale, so it seems like the best choice (though I'm also monitoring ebay because every so often you can find a 2600K for like $150).
Now as for the motherboard, is it worth the extra $40 or so to grab a 990FX board? I don't really need all the features present on a 990 vs the 970, I'm just curious if there would be a problem with overclocking headroom on the 970. I know if I was using an 8350 it'd definitely be a better choice to use the 990 board - but with the 970 would the ceiling for overclocking be hit first by the chip or by the VRMs?
Another benefit of the 970 board, though, would be that it'd save some money now but be enough to hold me over until 2015 when we would (hopefully) be seeing a Steamroller or Excavator enthusiast lineup.
As long as you're not doing Dual graphics or heavy overclocking, the 970 board will be adequate enough. I've got a buddy with the MSI 970 board that overclocked a 4100 to 4.6ghz on auto overclock no problem. You just won't be able to really push it harder once you hit the general threshold.
Intel did a big screw-up with Haswell, Sandy Bridge can still keep up if overclocked properly. So i'd settle for ur current set up and then go for either broadwell/Steamroller whenever that arrives.
i would personaly go with a FX8320 with an Asus M5A99FX pro R2.0 mobo, realy sollid combination, geat OC ability, als CF/sli capability at 16X and performs equaly to the i5.
getting an sandy bridge i7-2600K with an decent mobo, is offcourse a great choice. But you need to be sure that what you buy at ebay is not defective.
Well I was considering the 8320, but I was looking at the 6350 benchmarks and it's not far behind the 8320. I figure if I OC the 6350 I can easily match and beat the 8320's stock performance (if I need to, realistically I think it would be fine for me at stock for quite some time - for reference I currently have a Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 2.4GHz and that was fine until about BF3 release).
Right now I'm looking for a temporary option that will be a huge improvement from this Q6600 (which I cant OC btw, this motherboard won't allow overclocking) just to hold me over nicely until there's a Steamroller, Excavator or Broadwell/Skylake enthusiast chip. Right now Intel's stuff seems pretty overpriced considering compared to the stuff from 3 yrs ago it's only like 10-15% faster - I get the feeling we're at a bit of a plateau or a calm-before-the-storm. I think once AMD releases an enthusiast chip and once Intel releases Broadwell/Skylake and with DDR4 we'll see a real meaningful advancement. Sinking a lot of money into a "future proof" system now seems like a bad idea when we might see a big advancement in coming years, opposed to the very small increments lately
Eh, not a huge deal to me since the FX 6350 is only slightly behind the 8320, like 12% slower multithread.
How many games are really gonna use Mantle? Outside of EA (who partnered with AMD) I wouldn't see it as all that beneficial since all the devs are already used to DX11 and from what ive heard Mantle will be exclusive to GPUs with GCN architecture at first, so devs wouldn't want to waste time developing something that only benefits like half their customers