The top Intel CPUs are always a joke. You don't get what you pay for, you get 10% more for 300% the price. Only suckers buy those.
The sweet spot has always been in the $300-$400 range. I bought an i7-2600K for that within a month of release and it lasted me for years. I finally replaced it recently with an i7-6700k for about the same price and I suspect it will also last years--GPUs and storage are the bottlenecks now, not the CPU or RAM. I might have been able to get away with using the 2600k still if I'd been more aggressive in OC'ing it.
Synthetic benchmarks are useless. When they showed things like Haswell doing better than Sandy Bridge, yet using it in actual games resulted in improvements that fit within the margin of error for the benchmarks, I both double-flipped off and mooned every synth benchmark in existence and vowed to never again give an ounce of credit or respect to any of them.
A new CPU needs to be tested against an entire suite of games, from FPS to strategy to sims on the air and ground to get a good idea of its actual worth. Unfortunately, previews are not that.
The Jedi Master
I'm with a 3570k@4,1ghz the last 4 years and don't feel the need to change the CPU, just updating the GPUs and everything is fine. This chip is so good that will probably wait intel to release their 2nd or 3rd generation quantum-based CPU before upgrading.
