It's more expensive sure, but it's a 200 dollar difference that gives you 3 times the threads of an i5, it's maybe not as worth it to make the jump from an i5 than it is an i7. But spending the 100 dollars now is worth it in the long run, especially with a build like the above.
At a thousand bucks, what's another hundred when it gives you so much? If the budget was closer to 800 it would make more sense to maybe go skylake over haswell for the i5s
A budget's a budget, and anyway, X99's not really going to make sense if this guy is solely gaming. Single core performance should be priority once you've got over 4 threads for gaming alone, so the 6600k kinda makes sense there.
Erhm, how? Games for the most part don't tend to handle more than 4 threads at the moment, it's going to be like a decade before they can utilise TWELVE! Surely. And then you'd be way out of the lifespan of that chip, it'd probably be dead by then if not useless due to significant increases in single core performance by then. Going with a hyperthreaded dual core is probably the max before it becomes insensible.
Some are already using 8, so there's a start, but otherwise if he gets into any kind of video editing or just anything heavy the 12 thread CPU is going to be worth the extra money. Dunno when the OP is coming back though to answer some questions.
That's why I asked what the purpose of the build would be earlier in the thread. We don't really have enough information to put together a solid build.
Are we building for a dedicated gaming rig that can handle 4k or will it be lite gaming at 1080p but need to be able to handle 3d rendering and video editing or AutoCAD/3D modeling or other software that can utilized multiple cores and large amounts of RAM?
It's sure be nice, or like, I could just temp lock build-a-pc topics that don't answer those questions until the OP edits them into their post and PM's me telling me they've done it.