Everyone at the top-end is running socket 2011 6-cores, 12 threaded processors. :P I doubt you want to be dropping down $1,000+ to make that kind of switch, 3D Mark loves cores, especially in the Physics tests.
You would be surprised how many people are willing to drop thousands onto their PC just to get a better 3D Mark score, heck people do suicide runs with exotic cooling (Think: Nitrogen) and stupidly high voltages, the PC would only live long enough to do the benchmark run.

Sure, Intel dominates AMD in 3D Mark, but that's not to say an AMD FX 8320 is not going to be able to play games, far from it.
If you also run a dirty system (With like over 9000 programs booting up with Windows) or run Xsplit whilst gaming, AMD FX 8320 is a very solid choice anyway.

WHY!? Your PC begs to be overclocked! It's probably why I haven't bothered to upgrade my Sandy Bridge-E yet, it overclocks like a champ, making the "Silicon lottery" to Ivy Bridge-E utterly pointless as it's not guaranteed to clock as high.
Plus it's the only way I can keep up with the Haswell quaddies in lightly theaded tasks! :P

I don't see why you should buy a 7790. Instead I'd just wait when the 20nm process is ready for a noticeable boost in performance.

Definately go with FX-8320 if u want good value for money, also 8 cores. I'm also plan on using it on my next build, they overclock quite well. It's plenty enough for gaming and could be even more so as games start utilizing more cores.

Well. 8 Cores means squat when a Quad Core Intel Core i5 4670K is faster than AMD's 8-core FX 8320, even when all 8 cores are being used. It all comes down to whether that extra $80 (In Australia at-least) is worth it for you to choose Intel over AMD.

If you actually read any of the OPs posts you would know he has already bought his new GPU.

I'm banking on multi-core gaming to become much more prominent once the weak 8 core console CPUs get utilized. It's apparently easy to transfer the power gained there to PCs. Theres not a single game that benefits from the 4 extra cores of 8320 today though. But it's plenty enough good for currentgames still.

the only reason I would oc is if you play games like arma or ms flight sim x ...
but not because they need the power, but because they are horribly optimized or in case of fsx not optimized at all ...

people with having their i7 oc to 5ghz still have problems to run fsx properly with all the addons.
and arma is doing what arma always does ... having bad performance, especially in mp.

is maxwell the next one after haswell ? if yes i think intel said they can't keep up with the yearly release cycle of new cpu's so the next one is coming in 2 years earliest I hope.

ah ok ... yeah with a haswell and new nvidia gpu in 2014 you should be easiely prepared for the 'nextgen' ...

as for arma3 i also have no problems playing it sp on very high (maybe ultra on the showcase ones), but with multiplayer my pc crumbles like ouch :(

also fsx is a game not many play since those type of games are more or less dead sadly. But ocing it for that game help wonders ...
I did it with my 1st gen i7 and now with my haswell i5 and the difference is like day and night.

but other than that ocing is yeah useless unless you need your epeen meter higher up ^^ (for standard gaming)

Well. Games probably won't be using 8 cores for a long time yet as games won't be able to use all 8 cores on the consoles due to having a core or two reserved for other functionality like the Operating System and Kinect and other tasks.
But even when you load up all of AMD's 8-cores in a task such as encoding, it's still slower than a non-Hyper Threaded Intel Quad-Core, Haswell is that good.
At the end of the day though it's more than enough for most gamers needs, whether the money saved by going AMD is worth it or not, is up to the individual.
My FX 8120 system for example has been running at 4.8ghz since I got it, I am yet to run into a game it *cant* run, if all I did was play games I would probably have stuck with that CPU, unfortunatly for what I want, it's useless.

Besides AMD's 8-core Jaguar isn't going to be any faster than Intel's Hyper-Threaded Haswell Dual-Core Core i3 anyway, this generation will see far less CPU overhead for games as now game developers will be targeting *all* the instruction sets and little nuances in x86 land to eek out more performance, which didn't happen with the last generation.

Fair enough. I wan't the Haswell-E 8-cores/16-threaded chip.
That thing is going to be a monster, we should expect around 20-25% increase in IPC, 33% more cores. :)
Oh and shiny DDR4. :D
Probably a good thing it's still 1-2 years away, gives me time for my bank account to recover after this spade of upgrades.

I know consoles use 6 cores for games but getting this I will have good headroom if I multitask. I feel this is just not good time to invest on Intel since AMD has allmost everything in it's pocket, atleast not until I see how new games coming on next-gen consoles compare.

http://allforgamenews.com/2013/10/02/watch-dogs-pc-system-requirements-revealed-support-x64-8-core-2gb-vram-recommended So far watchdogs recommends 8 core setup allready, btw.