Unless you're going to be doing some heavy video editing jobs, rendering, or some intensive multi-channel audio recording with a ton of post-processing effects and the like, the price to performance ratio is absolutely not worth the jump to an i7, especially if gaming is the big reason you're building the computer as I assume it is for Pike. The marginal real world performance gain you get in frame rate from an i7 is not worth an extra $100+ when an i5 offers performance that is quite comparable.