It's been a while since my last upgrade, so I wanted to confirm this is the best option for the money.
The best option is waiting for summer and release of Ryzen 3000 serie.
While Intel has at the moment advantage over AMD thanks to higher clock speeds, don't see any good in current Intels at their current price.
Just for start there's barely any improvement in cores/threads per money from the early decade.
And that performance advantage to Ryzen is far far less than price difference.
And unlike those lot cheaper £300 CPUs of early decade, current overpriced CPUs won't stay high end even one third of the time.
Also despite of marketing being in "9th" gen those use same old 6th gen Skylake architecture, which is only one incremental step ahead of your Haswell.
(5th gen Broadwell was pretty much just getting 14nm working for high end CPUs)
Current Ryzens are clock speed limited because of second rate GlobalFroundries using originally Samsung's phone/tablet CPU node to make them.
Also architecturally improved Zen2 CPUs use TSMC's 7nm High Performance node, which is more advanced than Intel's node.
In CES AMD demoed eight core engineering sample matching 9900K's processing power at ~50W lower power consumption.
So there's room for clock speed tweaking without TSMC's node maturing from manufacturing time of that CPU in last year.
Also rumoured chiplet design got confirmed and AMD also hinted doing another push of core counts from Zen1.
So 8 cores/16 threads is likely going to be that fair £200 standard level model and 12c/24t £100 higher hobbyer level.
For the price level of that ludicrously overpriced 9900K there's likely 16c/32t model.
Next-gen consoles are also likely coming with 8c/16t Zen2.
So running heavy multiplatter games made for those is going to need lots of cores to run all the bloatware/overhead of Wintoys PC.
So buying Intel now is belonging to Intel's cash cow race instead of any PC master race.
