[sliken]

Just figured I'd mention that AMD significantly closed this gap with the Ryzen 2. The less parallel friendly applications (like many games) now seem to be faster on AMD or Intel depending on the application. Additionally the up to date security patches tend to hurt Intel more than AMD.

As always, if you really care about a single application, then you test it. But I wouldn't say that Intel wins on all single thread or few thread workloads anymore.

Especially if you consider that often a new Intel CPU requires a new Intel motherboard, and AMD often keeps motherboard compatibility across multiple generations, like the Ryzen and Ryzen 2.

[xxs]

Well, you can mod Z170 actually. Intel played super duper greedy and made a Z370 requirement.

Even Z170 can run 8700K, [0] Z170 (and Z270) needs a cooked bios and the cpu needs a pin short (easy with a pencil 4B) --- and it can even be overclocked if the motherboard VRM is good enough.

[0]: https://community.hwbot.org/topic/175489-asrock-z170-mocf-li...