Let me chime in here, look at my siggy, I built this complete setup for about $800. I did it for a couple reasons, first an amd can be clocked enough to complete with intel. The differences when you get within a few points of each other are not noticeable, The idea behind this build was to show customers in our store that system can be built that will be respectable in the extreme performance area with out costing as much, and since this is so much fun then built to have fun with, whether your into overclocking, gaming, video editing etc. I just did some runs with mine tonight and got it stable solid at 4.5 ghz without really pushing a brand new build. If you want cheap high performing that you can beat on and be forgiven then go amd. The 6300 is less then $120 and the 8350 is less then $200. As for mobo's go I got one and got rid of it in order to put in the Sabertooth 990fx R2, which is a very impressive board from anyone
s point of view. price for the sabertooth from Newegg was cheapest and they still back it. Depending on what your going to do with it determines the rest, you say you don't want to oc it right now but you want a oc board and processor, you want to start at the 2-3ghz range and pull 5ghx out of it. Why not start with the AMD which stats at 4, then your looking at a modest oc to get to 5ghz? Cooling has to be the priority and again you decide what your going to do with this build, I just came from playing Modern Warfare 3 where I never saw a temp over 30 and thats while running a defrag on my drives while I played. I built this for me, but I have no issues showing it to the customers that come into the shop so to give them ideas, also as such I have to have a clean decent respectable and horrifying serious build for that point I went with the Raidmax Vampire full size atx case, its a beast! I have added liquid cooling and a lot of fans, heat wasn't an issue with this, but the board is capable of generating some serious heat depending on the processor used.
TO sum it up really, you can get to 5ghz a couple ways, I choose the 6300 processor because of the fact that its cooler to start with, I did not see $80 difference in the performance of it and the 8 core AMD's and since the 6300 starts at 3.5 and "turbos" to 4.2 then in my mind most of the work is done already. The 990 chipset is great, the sabertooth board makes it fool proof, if you set it all wrong it simply will revert back to the original settings and you start all over again. Intel vs AMD will go on forever and each is right, some benchmark better then other, some score higher in gaming then others, my thinking is that what I don't throw at a name I can throw at things like RAM a better psu, or a liquid cooler. all things to take you further then you want to go. I agree for the most part with the thought expressed here that get the newest possible, the computer stuff is outdated so fast with out any help from us. But if I may, I will do you like I do my customers, rather then shove the newest latest greatest which always translates into more money, simply ask yourself what are you going to do with it, then that will go a long way towards telling you what processor you need then take the time to research each part after that and then before you know it you got a whole pile of parts to put together. And personally I have two things that bring me a lot of happiness, first is fixing a customers "dead" computer after "the other guys" say its history, and building my own, each time I accomplish the over clocking to the next step I sit and wait while it boots back up and watch prime 95 with pride as it passes each test. So I can sit here and tell you what you need, but really only you can tell you what you need, we can suggest the best options for hardware to meet that end, and I know I trust most of the people on here once you give them something to really go on then they are right there to help you. Listen to them, even over the reviews on newegg, and other seller sites, remember they are trying to sell you something, here we all have more toys then good sense, so if you buy or not does not impact our life at all, it simply plain simple good advice with no monetary gain in it at all.
