I know that Intel is faster, but they also cost a lot more. An AMD 8 core is really cheap, but is it better value to get a mid range Intel system?
The i7 would be the way to go, but if you are on a budget, there is nothing wrong with AMD, I have a 6 core AMD running at 2.7Ghz and it works just fine with Blender.
The thing to remember is that the processors are not inter-changable. So you are not buying an AMD processor you are buying an AMD processor and a mother board with an AMD socket to plug it into. It is a two-part option you are considering.
Yes I know that an AMD cpu requires a supported motherboard. The thing is that even the higher end motherboards for AMD is also cheaper than the motherboards for Intels. That combined with the low price of the AMD CPU’s, makes me wonder if it would be worth is to go with the cheaper AMD system, rather then a middle range Intel system.
As en example, I can get a 8 core 4.4ghz AMD system WITH a nice 3PCi slot motherboard, for almost the same price as the Intel I4770K chip alone.
Keep in mind than many things in Blender are still only single threaded so would not be able to use all the 8 cores in all cases. I would go for quad core Intel, but it’s just my opinion…
I asked for Cycles, because I want to be able to render in Cycles on a CPU 
Cycles will render much faster with 4770, I daresay up to 30% faster than with AMD.
If you’re on a budget, then it perhaps might be worth considering getting a used Intel 2600k
which is only about 10 percent slower than 4770 and still much faster than AMD (and it overclocks great too).
Great advice, thank you very much
Why do you want to render with a CPU and not the GPU?.Last time i checked,cycles rendered faster on GPU’s (Especially Fermi cards or dedicated cards like the Quadro series from Nvidia)
Some of the features in Cycles is only supported if you render og the CPU, and for the times when you run out of vram
I got a octcore it may be a little slower then an intel but then I got a decent gpu an tons of ram and a ssd disk
with the money I saved
read lots of reviews check lots of prices
but remember no matter what you pick you’ll always wonder if …
FYI I found a nice deal on a Intel 3930K (6 cores, 12 hyperthreaded and with 12Mb cache per [email protected] 3.2Ghz), combined with a MSi big Bang II motherboard. The board is really ugly, but it supports 4 GPU’s and has 8 Ram Slots 
I will install it in the start of next week.
if You had a money then consider invest in platform based on intel Xeon’s, doesn’t matter pc or mac pro but with my expirenced I’ve got best result render times even on older xeon’s than modern GPU, and CPU based platform use system memory witch gives You posibility of more complex scene with one render