Productivity and gaming. I'm a cs student so programming and I'm also a chrome tab whore (I know that's more of a memory thing). And a couple linux vms.
Probably just for the extra threads since you're stuck on that platform, of course you could always just sell the board you have now and get a Xeon 1231v3 based PC
I'd say i5, I mean modern hardware is already really fast and not advancing over past gens, but that's not my arguement. The i7 is not $125 more worth it sure its got twice as many thread but the same amount of cores. Gaming you'll see no difference and in rendering it'll also depend on the application. Typically you will see a difference, i7 being better. (obvi) maybe 25-35 better by my guess. (I'll do some research)
What does the rest of your build look like? Do you have an SSD? If you're deciding between the two and dont have an SSD get an SSD and the i5 you'll have a significantly more responsive system.
This is coming from the guy with a 5930K mind you.
I've got a 256gb ssd. I upgrade pretty regularly so I'm kind of thinking save $125 and go with 6600k. I don't even do any editing or rendering. But would it benefit me if I switch it to a media center pc down the road?
the i7 has 2mb (.5mb per core) of L3 cache and intel left all the features (or most of them) turned on, vs the i5 where the gimp the shit out of it.
in 99% of scenarios the i5 is fine, since they're almost identical performance clock per clock. in the last 1% the extra L3 and features will make the i7 faster.
also the i7s tend to overclock better.
gonna come down to if you're in that last 1% or not.