I'm curious which of the three above I should get. Here are the following prices (roughly on eBay):
i5 2500k ~$140
i5 3570k ~$180
i7 2600k ~$215
I'm curious what the best chip would be in terms of sheer price/performance. I was reading that the 2500k makes up for the 3570s better IPC with a better thermal adhesive between the silicon allowing higher overclocks. If I went the route of the 2500k, I could get a hyper 212 evo. If I go with a 3570k I will have to use the stock HSF. If I hold out until about April, I can get a 2600k, then later a Noctua NH-D14. This will be my first build, and I should have the barebones of it sometime around the first week of January. For the meantime I will be using a Celeron G1620 (makes me wanna puke at the thought of using a Celeron). Money's a little hard to come by, and I was lucky to find 4gb 1600mhz RAM, an MSI Z77A-G45, and the Celeron for $100 ( the rest of which is a CX 600, Rosewill Galaxy 01, 5400 RPM 500gb WD Blue, and an MSI GTX 650 Ti Boost (for now)). Thank you guys for any help you can provide.
If you are stretched for cash then bear in mind that a Sandybridge i5-2500 or i7-2600 (non-K version) are often substantially cheaper than the K variants.
This isn't so bad because:
1) The non-K variants have all the virtualization instruction sets (should you need them).
2) Sandybridge chips on a Z77 mobo can have all cores set to run at higher frequencies within their turbo range plus another x 4 e.g. it theoretically possible to get an i7-2600 to turbo up to 4.2GHz
3) This is a little bit tenuous, but you are buying a second hand chip, you may not know if an i5-2500k has been clocked to 4.8GHz and thrashed for a few years. It's likely a non K variant won't have been worked so hard.
4) This may help freeing up cash to put towards better cooling, more RAM or possibly a better card.
It doesn't sound like Zippy is too fussed about VT-D (I/O pass-through) but many of the MSI Z77A series boards do support it (or at least offer a BIOS option to enable/disable) the Z77A-G45 amongst them.
The board definitely supports VT-x (as does the i7-2600k) so whichever chip is used running VM's under Hyper-V in Windows 8.1 Pro or Enterprise editions will work if ever needed.
Then, out of the three you posted, 2600k. Some of what you will be doing will benefit from quite a bit from hyperthreading, which the 2500k and 3570k aren't capable of natively.