frkino said:
Depending on perspectives and your OC goal, the extra $150+ an be easily justified by the quality of the chip itself. You probably have heard of the Core i7-2600k reaching 5GHz+ operating frequency, but I bet it is less often to be achieved on a Core i5-2500k.
I guess I'm differing on perspective because they are both of the same quality - Material wise.
The 2500k's actually hit over 5Ghz more consistently BECAUSE of the lack of hyper threading.
That being said, I find my 2500k PERFECTLY fast when combined with a SATA3 SSD and the RAM to do anything I want. Now if I was rendering movies a good bit more, or playing around where even more CPU power is needed (my 2500k has only hit 100% once when doing day to day things and that was encoding a 1080p movie), I may go for the 2600k, HOWEVER, you have to weigh if it's really worth DOUBLE for no noticeable day to day gains, unless you're doing heavy working.
Your software suite is more RAM dependent.