Hello Breaz I can give you some of my personal experience as well as a lot of experience I have from all my clients being a computer build consultant over the last 2 years.
Right up front I'll admit and wont argue that Intel has a more powerful CPU when it comes to single core productivity, that isn't up for debate imo.
In my house currently I have both AMD and Intel along with both AMD and Nvidia graphics cards available for testing.
The AMD system is based on the 8350 and I've used graphics cards ranging from GTX 660 ti single and in SLI(sold), as well as GTX 670 single and in sli(sitting on shelf). I've also used 7950, 7970, 280(currently using) and 290x(currently using) on this system.
The Intel system is a i5 3570k and I've tested the 4770k as well all with the same above cards.
Just to give an idea of what I do and how I use my systems.
I do live shows on twitch, I render some videos for youtube and I game.
Last year I had a 2nd i5 intel system next to the 8350 and doing what I do with the systems I saw no difference in performance with comparing game play but while streaming and gaming and doing video rendering the 8350 showed significant noticeable advantages. Even comparing the 8350 with the 4770k doing the rendering and live streaming I couldn't see any significant advantage making me want to keep either intel system so I sold them and kept the 8350. Mind you I paid out of pocket for all the CPU's and Motherboards mentioned.
Now with the new gen intel chips provide a small % performance increase over the last gen chips which may or may not equate to a noticeable performance gain over the 8350 but it does make a difference in the wallet which is subjective on if its worth that small performance gain.
I know you mentioned you don't care about drivers but when you've experienced them on the level I have from personal to 100's of clients reporting problems you tend to have that weigh in on decisions to choose products. So take it with a grain of salt but here is what I've experienced over the last two years with drivers:
I can tell you that out of all the 100s of clients I have whom use Nvidia, including some decent sized Youtube "Friends" I've had countless daily reports of drivers crashing, instability complaints over the last year.
My personal experience is that since just January I'd have at least 3-5 driver crashes daily while using Nvidia drivers.
Now comparing that to my clients whom use AMD graphics cards. The only driver issues I've had them complain about is with some crossfire setups. almost all other driver complaints I've had from clients ended up not being driver related.
My personal experience with using the variety of AMD graphics cards I have on hand is, not a single driver crash what so ever.
The current Gen Intel chip is the last chip for its current socket before intel changes sockets yet again. As with AMD the FX line seems to be what is going to stick around for a bit longer until we find out what AMD might be working on behind the scenes. If you look around the interwebs we've seen hints about AMD X86 and possible new hardware coming in 2015/2016 but we'll have to wait and see how that all turns out.
Let me know if you have any questions and I hope this helps a little.
