The Intel 980X will perform slightly better than the FX-8150, but to be honest, those are not the chips that I would choose for a gaming build. First of all, the 980X too expensive for the performance in general, and I would go for the new Ivy Bridge processors (or wait for the Haswells). Ivy Bridge offers better performance for less of a price. Haswell will also be a more 'stable' version of the Ivy Bridge iteration from Intel and will also feature the 22nm lithography. Haswell will fix the overclock 'heat' problems associated with Ivy Bridge, while greatly improving performance. If you are looking for an awesome value chip, I would suggest the AMD FX-8350. I actually regret not getting this one - the value is amazing and it is one of the top-performing chips out there. Secondly, I want to say this to most gaming PC builders out there: the CPU is not nearly as big of a deal as the GPU. A lot of people make the mistake of buying an expensive processor on the gaming build when it really doesn't make a difference. An i5 processor vs. an i7 processor with the same GPUs will barely differ in the FPS because modern games are designed to defer almost all the graphics load to the GPU. But all in all, I think you should really consider the AMD FX-8350. If I were you, that'd be the CPU I'd get.