swifty_morgan :
970 is best why ? Because the slightly higher clock speed gives it a few extra FPS ? If I were buying a processor right now I'd go right for a 6core. And if you look, I posted something inre to games that already benefit from the extra cores. Think it isn't coming.... think again. Look under cpu's for 6core and gaming......... and you can bump the 6core to run at the same speed as that quad. So what's the benefit. You can't add cores.
Uh, yes, precisely because the higher clock speed gives it a few extra fps.
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/186?vs=146 And again, note that for the most part, a better GPU will matter much more than the difference in clock speed or cores.
The OP didn't indicate anything about overclocking or not, so it's kind of pointless to discuss that without more information on the OP's plans.
Physical cores have been staying well ahead of the requirements of the majority of games for quite a while now. Except for some RTS games and GTA IV, very few games make good use more than a couple of cores. By and large, gaming developers code to the last or current generation hardware. There's no reason for any gaming company to make a game that only runs on 4+ cores until at least 50%-75% of the gamer market has a 4+ core computer. How well would a game requiring 6 cores sell? (Answer: horribly.)
Beyond that, in traditional gaming, there isn't a great use for parallelization. Almost everything depends on the user playing the game...my understanding is that it's hard to code a lot of simultaneous commands that don't depend on input from the user. Parallelization has its use, but to date, it hasn't really been well-implemented in games.
More cores will certainly be used eventually. I just don't see it becoming a severe problem for the next few years. Maybe by the time the OP is ready to upgrade, it should be a consideration...but the question posed and the workload don't lend themselves to a hex-core.