Palladium

Let me tell you why I did it: $100 extra for i7 is nothing when building a new powerful build from scratch. For Haswell, HT is a significant 20% IPC boost over non-HT in games like BF4, and games are expected to be become more heavily threaded in the near future. A realistic i5 ~300-500MHz OC over is not enough to counter point #2. Oppoturnity costs of OCing. In a hot climate I live in I reckoned I need to spend at least $120 for a Z mobo and a $100 H100i to make a $240 4690K hit 4.5GHz. That's $460 right there while still dealing unpredictable chip lottery. While I can just spend the same money on a $340 i7 running with a $50 H81 mobo and a $30 212+ HSF for a guaranteed 4GHz and HT. Anyway, if you are the kind of guy who spends $200+ on mobos and $100+ on cooling you really have no ground to stand on for arguing against i7s.

Budget gaming? AMD has nothing against G3258 OC / H81 / <$100 discrete HD7770 or GTX750. Grandmother PC for watching cat videos on Youtube? AMD gets creamed in power efficiency. Midrange gaming and up? Furgetaboutit. The only thing AMD wins is where their 8 cores can fit into some super tiny niche while still having to deal with gargantuan power consumption, or a dubious APU "gaming" machine where is barely has enough horsepower to run 720P.

Here are my thoughts: IMO spending big money to overclock a Haswell i5-K chip has now been made largely pointless with the 4790K already running 4 core turboed to 4.1Ghz at stock on even the cheapest of budget mobos, when it boils down to overall price the H100i + Z-mobo + 4690K is going to cost the same as a 4790K + H81 mobo. Heck you can't even do multiGPU on ITX mobos so a Z87/97 mobo makes even less sense here. In super CPU-intensive heavy multithreaded games where the CPU performance actually matters like BF4 whatever ~300 to 500MHz extra you can realistically get from OCing a 4690K is not going to compensate for the significantly ~20% IPC boost hyperthreading provides. In non-CPU intensive stuff both are going to be massive overkill anyway...So there.