For the sake of this comparison, I'm going to assume that the 3770K and the 2700K are more or less equal (Ivy Bridge is a bit faster per clock, with Sandy Bridge having better thermals with overclocking).

What would be the benefits in performance by stepping up to the 3930K? What applications and computing tasks would benefit most from using the 'Enthusiast' CPU?

The ones that can address all those threads. There are two extra cores hyperthreaded. Some encoding apps, encryption stuff, CG modeling, and a bunch of synthetic benchmarks like Cinebench.

Some very rare exceptions aside, I don't really consider the 3930K a viable option. If you're a working professional doing the above tasks all day maybe, but not for casual semi-pro type home users. For the vast majority of tasks the comparisons are very close, and then consider price. It's well over $500 and the 2011 socket boards are like $200+. USB 3.0 isn't native to it IIRC either. SBE didn't do much for me.

Thanks Gonso.

It seemed a lot extra to pay for not a whole lot more performance.

Would using the computer for a Digital Audio Workstation be able to use the 2 extra cores and the corresponding extra threads?

Possibly, but that's a better question for whoever produces whatever software you use, and how you use it. Talk to the developers on their forums and they'll tell you.

For my part it's lighting money on fire if you're just doing some home recording projects in Reaper using a handful of plug-ins. If you're doing huge complex projects then you might want a ridiculous amount of RAM and all the cores you can get, or some dual Xeon industrial setup. Really depends.

Agree with the above, unless you were able to get a 3930k for $200 from IRE. Then why the hell not

Well, yeah. Any of those CPUs at $200 is a snap buy, even if you're not computer shopping

What's IRE?

Intel Retail Edge. It's this thing. The chip wasn't a good fit for me so I lost interest pretty quickly