I'd say go for the AMD Athlon X4 620 2.6GHz Propus. Save more than 100 bucks and get good stuff. Don't know how big is the difference between that and the Core i7 as far as gaming goes.
I don't know guys. The Athlon 2 X4 is close to the Q8400 in terms of performance, and we never recommended those.
AnandTech Bench (beta): AMD Athlon II X4 630 vs Intel Core 2 Quad Q8400
Not only that but when using multiple video cards, especially the new ATI cards, that could introduce some major bottlenecks. The i5 750 does much better in crysis than the athlon 2, more than what you can explain with just being a faster cpu. It looks to me like the Athlon is pretty close to bottleneck territory with beefier video cards.
AnandTech Bench (beta): AMD Athlon II X4 630 vs Intel Core i5 750
And that brings up another topic:The i9 will NOT be cheap, just look at its name and the target market. I know i would love one for rendering, but they also probably wont see that much improvement in gaming. We dont know if LGA1366 will continue after the i9 [hopefully it will] but we do know that LGA1156 will be limited.
In alot of circumstances i would recommend buying an i7, but in your circumstance i would think its better to just save the money and get an i5 setup that will do almost as well. You wont have alot of upgrade options down the line, but theres nothing to say you will with an i7 setup either. If you save some cash it then makes a new computer down the line not so bad.
If your only going to use one graphics card, want to save cash, dont intend to get an i9, dont want HT and so on, there really isnt much point going for an i7.
And that brings up another topic:
Are the current-gen games able to run on more than four cores?
There are very few games that use 4 cores, but many current titles use 2.