I am not looking to shave the budget, it is more important to have a great system with the best components.
Well, one thing is sure:
That arm and both legs priced (3 year old architecture) Intel isn't going to keep its value/performance even third of the time your current bought for lot less CPU.
While Intel has now advantage, that's mostly because of AMD having been stuck on second rate GlobalFoundry's mediocre manufacturing tech...
Originally developed by Samsung literally for phone CPUs!
That advantage is going to end before summer and that Intel will likely drop to basic level.
In CES AMD demoed Zen2 engineering sample matching 9900K's processing power at lot lower power consumption.
(thanks to TSMC's superior 7nm node being lot ahead of Intel)
Also chiplet design for desktop was confirmed.
Meaning 8c/16t is likely standard level, with 12c/24t becoming enthusiast level and possibly 16c/32t as super high end.
And unless finalizing of DDR5 (late since 2016) pick ups speed fast, also next year's AMD releases likely fit into current motherboards after BIOS update.
Chiplet design would even allow AMD to easily release improved CPU die in AM4 CPU parallel to DDR5 socket CPUs...
Next-gen consoles are also likely to use 8c/16t Zen2.
Lack of bloatware overhead of Windows PC and programming for fixed hardware is going to mean those games have more processing power available for them than some clocks speeds would imply.
And with very reasonable power consumption of 9900K matching CES demo Zen2, clocks could be quite high.
So in two years heavy multiplatter games are likely to hammer PC CPUs seriously, unless they have clearly more available processing power to handle all background bloatware and other overhead.
So do you want what's fastest for this winter?
Or future proof platform for many years with simple update of CPU?
Intel won't give latter and utilization of higher number of cores is the only path for major improvements in games.
Anyway for single graphics card PC there's no sense in over 750/850W PSU, unless you're into overclocking CPU using really exotic cooling.
It will only make desktop/idle consumption efficiency suck, especially when you're aiming for now standard level efficiency rating.
For that pricy PC would anyway see 80+ Platinum PSU more fitting.
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/seas...-platinum-modular-power-supply-ca-05v-ss.html
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/seas...-platinum-modular-power-supply-ca-05w-ss.html
Also there's little sense in paying that much for super luxury SSD.
Advertised fully snake oil synthetic benchmarket numbers don't even give much real use benefit in for example gaming:
https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Samsung/970_Pro_SSD_512_GB/13.html
More reasonably per GB priced NVMe drive for OS and some programs with lot cheaper per GB SATA-drive for games would make more sense.
Unless you already have there proper surround sound home theater setup, you should be looking at other half of gaming immersion: Sound.
In case of headphones you wouldn't even need to pay much any compared to those other parts to get to very high level.
Was tempted by the 2700x, it's great value but single core performance just isn't that much of an upgrade from my 3770k @ 4.5GHz.