So my cousin just moved to the US for College and he wants a really good gaming PC. It's for 1440p gaming. He does not want to go over $2200 dollars but he will go over if needed. Trust me, I have told him multiple times that this is overkill but he won't believe me. This is strictly for gaming. He will also be overclocking the CPU quite a bit.
I made him a build, though I'm not sure about the parts since I don't have much experience with high end builds.
If the system if strictly gaming, why not go for an i5 3570k, it can overclock very well, it isnt too expensive and the cores are individually more powerful than AMD ones. So you will be getting much better gaming performance when you consider that there arent even very many games that use 4 cores, let alone 8 cores. If the rig is purely for gaming as you say, then I believe that 8 cores are useless.