Why not a 3700X or a 3900X? From what I understand the z390 platform will be dead in the water soon and the 3700/3800X is just 5 to 9% slower than the 9700K, is a bit cheaper and you get 8 extra threads.
"X platform will soon be dead" is a meme. Unless you buy new hardware every year, you'll be upgrading platforms long before your CPU needs upgraded (after all, once the 4000 series comes out in ~6 months, AM4 will be dead in the water as much as z390 is now). I upgraded to the 1700 over my ivy bridge i5 not because of the CPU, but because I wanted NVMe boot, and ivy bridge couldnt do it natively.
Extra threads are completely worthless for gaming, and anything I need to run that is thread happy, well, that twin 8 core 96GB server in my PC dox runs quite well.
Why switch back to intel? Well, AMD screwed me. Late September my 1700 started throwing hardware level cache errors that would hard lock the PC. I spent a month trying to get AMD to warranty the damn CPU. Fun fact if you want to buy AMD, all their customer support is done over email, with an average 3-4 days between responses. After a month, AMD finally demanded pictures of my build, which I sent. AMD stated that, since I used a 120mm watercooler instead of their cheap-ass loud aluminum block, they would not warranty my CPU and would need to buy a new one. I wasnt exactly keen on spending $300+ on the company that was weaseling out of their own warranty. Once I did the math, I was able to sell the old motherboard, cooler, and memory, and buy a new i7, mobo, cooler, and RAM for $400 or so, compared to $350+ for a 3700x after shipping and taxes.
Sidenote; intel will not refuse your warranty for using a high end cooler, and their warranty process takes hours instead of weeks, as they have *shocker* a phone number, and a live chat, not just a janky RMA form buried on their website!
www.youtube.com
