Intel I7-4790K OR AMD FX-9590 for Warlords of Draenor

No brainer, the i7-4790k is the clear winner here.

WoW is only CPU-bound because its so light on the video card. Its not that its CPU workload is so intensive, its more that your GPU is capable of insanely high framerates, leaving the CPU to limit performance first.

If this is just for gaming, skip both and go with the Core i5-4690K. The i7-4790K is basically the same processor, just that its got Hyperthreading, which will generally only make a difference in productivity related tasks (3D rendering, video editing, etc.). Skip the FX-9590 entirely—for its absurd 220 W TDP, you get a chip that struggles to compete with the aforementioned Core i5 most of the time. Its a gimmick.

I'm not so sure about you getting an i5-4690k. I tried playing NFS Undercover with hyperthreading disabled on my i7 and the game became an unplayable laggy mess. With the 4790k, you can choose to turn off hyperthreading at will to cut CPU temps and save energy and turn it on if you need the extra performance in some games.

I love AMD, but the 9590 is a HUGE POS

Actually, just get the i5 4570. If you aren't overclocking, then the "K" isn't worth it. Also i7's have nothing over the i5's in gaming performance

I was under that impression also, it was around two years ago and hyperthreading actually hurt performance in some cases, but I have heard that more recently Hyperthreading has been implemented more.

If you look at nearly every graphics game benchmark though, there is zero difference between an i5 and an i7, and even an i3 in some games. It's all about the future, and what resources your game uses the most- CPU or GPU, and if it uses hyperthreading well.

Personally, I would lean towards an i5 because of price, but check this out... A Xeon 1231v3:

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1231 V3 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor ($247.98 @ SuperBiiz)
Total: $247.98

That is the same as an i7-4770 really, just a slightly lower clock speed. It costs the same as an i5-4690K, and you get all the benefits of hyper-threading, and the price difference issue is eliminated.

It is a great option, and I would seriously consider it.

Hope that helps

I TOTALLY forgot about those entry-level Xeons. Those would be hands-down THE best option for anyone not overclocking and looking for a good CPU

Clock speed and core count is not a measure of compute performance. The 9590 is largely a gimmick/novelty that has a lot of big superficial numbers. The FX series has it's place, but that isn't as a gaming platform as the arrangement of execution resources is terrible for real time workloads. The 9590 doesn't really have ANY useful purpose beyond being an AMD novelty. I find the aging AM3+ platform to make the most sense as a multi-tasking workstation and budget research/testing platform as it supports features at bargain basement prices you won't find on Intel, like ECC and IOMMU.

(Though I'll admit that for a mixed use machine with gaming as one of those uses, an overclocked FX-6300/8320 if budgeted properly isn't a terrible alternative to an i3/i5, and may be preferential in some rare cases)

A Hyperthreaded Haswell Core at 3GHZ has the same execution throughput as a PileDriver module (2 cores) at ~3.75GHZ. How's that possible? A haswell core has more execution resources, a shorter instruction pipeline, and significantly better cache latency and bandwidth than a PileDriver module. If we actually count the stuff that matters (execution resources) we start to realize that the superficial stats like "cores" and "ghz" can be very misleading.

When running only 1 thread per haswell core, vs 1 thread per PD module (As is the case that sets the tone for performance in 99% of gaming conditions when comparing a Haswell 4 core to PileDriver 8 core), the Haswell at 3GHZ performs on par with PileDriver at ~5.25GHZ.

Due to the above, a haswell i5-4440 and FX-9590 have similar gaming performance overall.

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As mentioned, the best value all around is probably the E3-1231V3. It has the multi-threaded execution performance of the FX-9590, but with up to ~25% better execution performance to real-time workloads like gaming. Even though HT won't necessarily improve gaming performance directly, it may indirectly be beneficial for background tasks, or if you ever wanted to do screen captures as it increases execution throughput by concurrently running multiple threads on the same core (same cycle). HT basically allows the execution engine to achieve higher port saturation (less wasted opportunity within the engine).

yeah, Intel is much stronger per core while running cooler and using way less power. You can pair the i5 4690 with an h81 motherboard and still have usb 3.0 and sata 3