A PS4 equivalent rig for $500.00?

[Pemalite]

ithis said:

Really? ... You're stainding buy the bolded??

Pretty much.
I have an AMD FX 8120 in another PC, it's about as fast as an Intel Quaddy, would pale against Haswell.
You need about a 1ghz clock speed advantage for an FX to roughly match Intel on a per-core basis.
The FX's IPC is actually lower than the Core 2 (Which in turn was also faster than the Phenom 2 which was also faster than the FX, clock for clock and core for core.)
Granted the Phenom 2 if you pushed up the NB clock to around 3ghz you could achieve anywhere from 10-15% improvement in IPC which put it roughly on par and in some cases pushed past the Core 2 based CPU's.

In Single threaded applications and games (Yes, modern games are still released as single core only like Sins of a Solar Empire) even an Intel i3 Dual-Core is faster than AMD's 8 Core.
Even with games like StarCraft 2 a heavily clocked Haswell Intel Dual-Core is faster.

Don't just take my word for it though. - Add another 30% performance advantage in Intels favor as that is about the difference between Sandy and Haswell.
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/697?vs=363
You can pick up the i5 2400 stupidly cheap these days...