Well I said "almost all" so it's still sub-uptimal. :P

I just don't see a reason to limit myself. Knowing that I could've easily done better is one of the worst things for me. I know what I'm talking about. I regret my purchase of my 3570k as soon as it arrived at home. Now whenever I run into a scenario where it is limiting I will bash my head in because I didn't just buy the i7.

I would've probably killed myself if I went for a GTX670 instead of the 680. The 680 was still lackluster for me but I least I knew that I couldn't have done better at the time I bought it.

Look he is building a PC for 2014. In 2014 games use 8 threads:

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/msi_z87_xpower_review,15.html

http://www.techspot.com/review/615-far-cry-3-performance/page6.html

The FX-83xx performs somewhere around an i5 - i7 pretty consistantly, the FX-63xx performs inbetween an i3 and i5, and FX-43xx is as strong as an i3.  Are you one of the people that said the Pentiums were stronger than Phenom II X4's?  You guys made me laugh so hard when all games started using 4 cores in 2012 and caused these intel budget builders to get sub 20 framerates.

P.S. I have an i7-4770K and it kicks ass.  My brother has an FX-8350, and it matches my old i5-3570K.

LOL the 680 is a joke in price/performance compared to the 670.  But whatever man you can act like money is no object if you want...

Money is no object to me when it comes to my hardare. I go for performance and not price/performance ratio. Sure, I have my limits but those seem to be a bit higher than most.

You can preach all day long how great some things are considering price but that doesn't make them any stronger. A few bucks on my table don't move the pixels on my screen faster.

I will definitely go for an 880(or 880ti if available) next time around. Why would I buy weaker if I have the money?

Yea but the issue, and I continue to say this which you don't seem to understand, is that majority of the applications and games will still run better with the i5 which is even proven on your benchmarks. He spent almost 2k on his PC, he should have went with an i5 so that it can run better on most games instead of the ones that are just multi-threaded... If he was going a sub $1000 or $1200 build, sure, go amd, but above $1200 should be intel or at least the FX-8350 at minimum. And I respect Amd and my first gaming PC had an Amd Phenom II inside of it and I still use it to this day

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/699?vs=702

Oh yes. It's not as well featured as it once was (no more unified memory ). But the gains in performance should be quite big, indeed.

Hopefully we'll see some those out by late Q3/early Q4 this year. 

CPU is fine. If OP wants more performance he can just buy an aftermarket cooler and apply a bit of overclocking. Besides, the FX 6300 is not bad processor. A Hexa Core CPU based on Vishera should do fine for games (current and future titles).

Also, the R9 290 IS high end. Its the enthusiast range. I'd say anything from R9 280 onwards is considered higher end of the spectrum - on AMD's side of things.

Games generally don't use 8 cores.
And even when they do, they still in general perform better on Intel's Quad Cores.
If you look at the benchmarks you posted... They don't show substantual gains of Intel's Quads to Hex core processors.

AMD is a little different.
The reason why the scaling is more severe with more cores is because of the CPU's "modular" core design.
Floating point units are shared between 2 cores, each core is a seperate integer entity.
However, if you only had an AMD Quad Core, the execution resources for floating point is cut in half, whilst on the Octo-cores there is enough for the PC to park processing tasks on each module, allowing for more floating point resources for four threads.

AMD's FX processors were primarily designed for the server space, first and foremost. - A massive portion of server related tasks are integer heavy, which AMD is still stupidly competitive against Intel with due to not sharing Integer between cores.


In terms of total performance however, AMD needs a large frequency advantage just to match Intel, the first-gen FX processors per-thread are slower than the Phenom 2 and the Phenom 2 was slower than the Core 2 on a per-threaded basis.
This hammers home the point that in lightly threaded tasks, AMD's processors are woefully inadequate.
However to AMD's credit, the Phenom 2's could really switch into another gear when you overclocked the NB to around 3ghz, which in some situations could increase IPC by roughly 15%, then overclock the CPU to 4ghz-4.2ghz and even today.

Some examples of lightly threaded albeit CPU demanding games is: Sins of a Solar Empire. - Just try and run that in the late stages of a match and expect solid and stable performance on an AMD processor. (Hint: I can't do it on an FX 8320 @ 4.4ghz, my i7 3930K manages it with ease at 4.8ghz.)
Another is StarCraft 2, the AMD processors simply tank when you have units counting in the mid-thousand.
Intel you can at-least feel confident that regardless of how lightly threaded a game is, you are going to still have great performance.

Lets compare the FX 8320 against Intel's Nahalem i7 990X.
It's 4 years old now, has 2 less cores (And AMD calls them "Cores" so the comparison is in AMD's favor.) than the FX, roughly the same clockspeed as the FX, guess who wins?
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/444?vs=698
There is anywhere from 12-30% performance difference, in favor of the old 990X.

Heck, the 8320, with a tiny clock advantage can't beat Intel's old Sandy Bridge Quad Cores:
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/287?vs=698
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/288?vs=698

And for something completely funny...

Let's compare AMD's 2014 model FX 4300 Quad Core against Intels 7 year old Core 2 Quad Q9770.
Well, that's unexpected, performance isn't that different despite AMD having a 600mhz clock speed advantage and being on a newer fabrication process and capable of using turbo to boost itself to 4ghz.
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/48?vs=700

AMD CPU's are horrible, but they are "good enough" for most people, you couldn't pay me to go back to AMD in my primary machine, even if it was a dual-socket 16 threaded opteron.

Nice! The only questionable part there is the CPU, but nice anyway.

Now you must have a lot of PC games to catch up on :D

Agree with you about the case, when I switched from desktop to mid-tower I wondered why I didn't do it before.

And gratz for your new PC, what a beast! 

Right now, not being ready for building a new PC myself (I'd go for mid-low cost and low power consumption as I always do, anyway), I just ordered a new HDD and a R7 250 with passive cooling, modest, but silent and it will run circles around my current on-board Radeon HD3300. Also, for a old PC it didn't make sense a more powerful one, and it's a sensible choice to increase performances and free some precious hundreds MB currently used by the on-board GPU besides its dedicated 128MB DDR3 sideport memory, as doubling from 4GB to 8GB DDR2 ECC main RAM would be very expensive and quite pointless, old and slow tech that would cost me like the new GPU, as it's out of production, actually I'd pay that RAM more than I did with the first 4GB that I bought when my fav online shop was doing special offers on Kingston products.

PS When I'll build my next PC, I'll go for AMD too, although I won't choose top absolute performances for the CPU, but top of the low-power consumption range.