I have been a die hard AMD fanboy for many many years, and I think Intel has finally swung my vote. In the past my greatest concern has been heat management and affordability for speed. This chip rocks! Im running skyrim on moderate settings with plenty of interface and graphics mods just off of the CPU integrated graphics! full blast this thing is whisper quiet and runs at a cool 35 deg C with the fan that came with the chip.

I use this CPU in my current build. I upgraded from an AMD FX-6100. For encoding and burning DVDs, it's more than twice as fast as the hexacore AMD (went from @50 minutes to @20 minutes.) Gaming framerates are also significantly improved. If you need hyperthreading though, you might prefer the i7-3770K. For gaming, this CPU is more than sufficient and $100 cheaper!

This process blew me away. I overclocked it to 4.4 Ghz on stock voltage using a Corsair H60 water cooler. Ran the Prime95 stress test for a few hours with no errors. Normal idle temps are 31 C and average temps while gaming (Planetside 2 and Guildwars 2) are usually in the mid 50's. It's paired with a Asrock Extreme 4 motherboard and 8 gigs of Samsung 30nm DDR 3 ram (also overclocked @ 1866 mhz and 9-9-9-24 timing).

Great processor, plenty of power for some of the most demanding applications without breaking the bank.

This is one powerful quad core processor. The high clock is very good already, and the turbo boost makes it even faster. I mainly use my pc for gaming and programming, and in both tasks this processor proved to be simply fast.