Upgrading my processor

[unruly]

Ivy costs a bit more, is negligably faster and supposed to run hotter? (heatspreader for stock cooler as you mentioned, apparently they didn't have an extra penny left to spend on better thermal paste for a 250 euro cpu)

And I told him not to get an i3. (for the same reason people shouldn't have gotten a c2duo)
But no really, tell me what other intel cpu you'd suggest he get than the 2500K, go on.

2700k? But then again, he's supposed to be on a budget and the moderately better performance of the 2700k isn't really worth the extra $100 cost over a 2500k.

In all honesty, pretty much everyone who works with performance PCs will tell you that right now Intel is the way to go if you're wanting the best bang for your buck, and the specific processor they'll recommend is a 2500k in most cases. AMD's Bulldozer architecture, while having so much potential, was a near-total flop in actuality. The 2500k pretty much walked all over the Bulldozer offerings at their launch, and from what I understand it hasn't gotten much better in the time since then. Of course, while performance hasn't really improved for AMD, they've dropped their prices a couple times now so the FX-8150, which does perform pretty similarly to the 2500k, is now a $50 cheaper option.

But then you still have to contend with the fact that your new FX-8150's performance seems to be very workload-specific. A lot of the reviews showed that it would rival the 2500k and 2600k on heavily-threaded stuff, but when you got to lightly-threaded performance it got beat pretty badly(and by its predecessors too).

[harhis23]

Yeah, you could use Phenom II 555 then overclock it to 4.2GHz.