IMO, you don't need the fastest CPU for gaming. I saved a ton of money by getting an AMD FX-8350 (I already had an AMD motherboard on hand, so that helped too),

IMO, you don't need the fastest CPU for gaming. I saved a ton of money by getting an AMD FX-8350 (I already had an AMD motherboard on hand, so that helped too), and although it does bottleneck in really CPU-intensive games, I can run almost all games on the highest settings at 2560x1440. The graphics card is really the only component that you need to splurge on for a gaming rig these days, because it's the bottleneck for the vast majority of games.