New computer

[Concillian]

I wouldn't count 1366 out just yet. It appears that Intel may be looking to release more i7s that use the 1366 socket. They have updated the extreme processor for 1366 recently and seems like they're preping non-extremes for the socket as well. So if you are interested in true x16/x16 SLI/XFire, you might want to wait a little bit and see what Intel does in the next month or two.

2500k outperforms the 990x in games. If buying for games, 1366 won't make sense, and hasn't made sense since the previous gen i5-750 (Socket 1156)

New processors comparable to 1366 will be released on a new socket 1356, supposedly late this year.

1366 is dead for gaming with 1155 being simultaneously faster, cheaper, and lower power consumption. The extra cores of a 990x are useful for certain applications, but very, very few games know what to do with more than 4 cores. A good portion don't know what to do with more than 2.

Socket 1356 might end up faster, but I'm willing to bet that a 2500k with mild overclock will hold it's own once the total cost is considered.

An i5-750 performed neck and neck with an i7-9xx at the same speed in games. Triple channel memory and hyperthreading sound great in theory, but the performance benefit is very, very small for games, and was never really worth the additional cost. Even the extra PCI-e lanes for true 16x / 16x dual GPU solutions was a minimal performance improvement over 8x / 8x.

Technically 1356 will probably be faster, but once price is considered, 1155 will still be a very viable choice.

Keep in mind this quote from Anand:

However, the vast majority of games today will be limited by whatever graphics card you have in your system. The performance [CPU] differences we talked about a earlier will all but disappear in these scenarios. [...] Any CPU near the high end, when faced with the same GPU bottleneck, will perform the same in game.

Getting the absolute fastest CPU is not absolutely critical. You can afford to get something that is a good value in the upper-midrange and expect it to be good for a while. Even people with mildly overclocked LGA755 dual core CPUs 3 generations old now are able to do pretty well in current games.

It's why most gamers will look at a 2600k vs a 2500k and choose a 2500k. $100 saved for very little performance loss is worth it to many in todays world. The 2600k is definitely faster, but when you can (very easily) overclock them to the same speed, the differences are so minor that the $100 is not worth it.