Re: It isn't eight cores and it's still embarassingly slow
Well, while you're talking about SINGLE THREADED apps, sure. You are correct. Lots of games have a sweet spot at 4 cores (like a lot of intels offerings.) These are OK if you only game, or are happy with only a few open programs.
Me though, I use a number of sensible programs that use ALL of the available cores. And they fly with my FX9590. I have a large screen real estate and many forground programs and a number of background services too. my kit rarely gets to 40C (about 20C above ambient.) A corsair H110 water cooler sees to that, and I only run at stock clock speed, 4.7GHz.
I use Intel i7's at work, it is trying to provide the same environment as I use at home. My home workstation is far, far more usable than the i7 setup.
The total cost of ownership weights heavily in AMDs favour too. AMD based motherboards, CPUs and High end graphics cards are much cheaper than the intel / nvidia products.
IMHO if you want to play, get intel. If you need to work, get AMD.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
