[glenndebacker]

Sorry but for years the mantra was for a gaming pic to invest in a i5 or even an i3 and spend the extra money in a good GPU. But for some bizarre reason suddenly everything that is not performing as an i7 7770k is a "bad cpu for gaming". It's ridiculous.

Hell in 30 million households there are 8 jaguar x86 core gaming machines active now with an IPC that is probably (I assume) atrocious.

I build my i7 4770 4 years ago and the sad part is that it will probably still take a lot of time for it to become a bottleneck in 90% of the games.

[BuckRogers]

If you check Digital Foundry's excellent i5 vs i7 benchmarks, if building a machine to game on you want 8 threads minimum today. Times have indeed changed on the old i5 recommendation.

That said, completely tangential to what you're saying. Ryzen may (at worst) perform like an i5 in gaming but it has more than 8 threads. I do everything with my machine and going with a R7 1700 overclocked.

[Zardoz84]

I use a FX8730E and they only bottleneck that I have it's my old GTX660 GPU.