FX-8350

If your gaming go with an i5 3570k. The Fx-8350 will probably bottleneck your 7970!

Streaming performace depends alot on how you are capturing and streaming. For something like a 'xsplit only' rig the more cores the better with the 6 core i7's being the top dogs here.

So I should pretty much build something from the ground up; SB-E or wait until this summer to see the performance of Haswell?

If you have a 990FX then get the 8350 it is actually a pretty good improvement over the 8150 at good cost.

Think the FX 8350 will allow me to stream at 1080p while gaming? I will be OC'ing.

What do you mean by streaming? The only streaming I know wouldn't be done while playing a game. I must be misunderstanding something.

Using something like OBS/XSplit/FME to stream to a provider such as Twitch/Own3d.

http://www.twitch.tv

The FX 8350 will allow you to do more due to great multitasking. Building a whole new rig won't give much performance compared to as much you pay. Intel does still beat AMD, but AMD has increased the performance of their CPUs by 10-15% over the Bulldozer architecture.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6396/the-vishera-review-a...

Look at this review. And decide by yourself.  

Your streaming the game itself? Ok.

The 8350 does seem well suited for this task. Though I have zero experience actually doing it.

Nope, not without a dedicate capture or encoder card. You're into the software only streaming I mentioned and at 1080 your looking at very expensive i7 processors to game at 1080 and encode at 1080. You're better option is the dedicated capture card. Thought to give some credit to AMD the 8350 could handle some games and encoding at the same time just not games like BF3 multiplayer.

This, even on the highest end Intel platforms, encoding hits FPS hard if we accept that Intel is the more efficient architecture and takes hits you can assume that AMD will take the same hit. Discrete capture device is the route to go, most youtubers do that.

I appreciate the replies, any capture/encoding cards that you could recommend? How much do capture cards actually help? I've looked at quality encoding cards and most of the high-end cards are pretty damn expensive. I have seen some capture cards sell for cheaper, but I'm wondering if it's an actual worth while purchase or simply going to be a slight increase in performance. It doesn't seem that using OBS I take a big hit when i'm just capturing, but when I actually begin to stream/encode is when I see the CPU usage spike.

If a CC is capable of shaving off even 10% of the CPU usage it would be a worth-while investment.

Thanks for all the help!