Microcenter has the 9700k for ~$200 right now and stacking board discount. I mean, if you are looking for gaming performance and are even considering Intel, a "reasonable" OC on that and it should be able to hold it's own really well.
9900k is $300. But at that point why not a 5600K? It looks like it essentially wins in multithreaded and single threaded benches against anything not Zen 3 based and it seems like, based on the time it took MC to sell out of them, they will be in greater supply generally speaking.
But, really, how much (significantly) better is anything than a 3970x at gaming? I was just checking the specs on that again and from cache to dram bandwidth it looks killer. Does it have memory latency issues or what?
For reference this is what I have today:
Workstation - AMD TR 3970X | ASUS ROG Zenith Extreme II | G.SKILL Neo 3600 64GB | EVGA 3090 FTW3 Ultra | 2x Sabarent 1TB NVMe | Samsung 860 EVO 1TB SSD | Phanteks Enthoo 719 | Seasonic Prime Ultra Platinum 1000w | Corsair K70 RGB Lux | Corsiar M65 | 2x ASUS Rog PG279Q | BenQ EW3270U | Windows 10 Pro | EKWB Custom loop
HTPC - Intel i7-10700k | Asus Z490-I| G.SKILL TridentZ RGB 3200 32GB | EVGA 3080 FTW3 Ultra | Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB | Samsung 860 Evo 1TB SSD | NZXT H1 | Windows 10 Pro
Spare - Intel i9-9900k | Asus ROG Maximus XI Code | G.SKILL TridentZ RGB 3200 32GB | Zotac 2080 Ti Amp | Samsung 970 Evo 1TB | WD Blue 1TB SSD | NZXT H700 | EVGA G3 1000W | Corsair H150i | Windows 10 Pro
The 3970X compared to the 9900K is worse in pretty much every game I've played on it. From lower frame rates to Far Cry 5/New Dawn not being able to handle more than 16 cores. I also get better results in benchmarks like in 3D mark if you don't factor in the CPU in Timespy.
That being said, I was hoping to either sell the 3970X or covert it into a VM server. The HTPC has a 3080 FTW3 which doesn't fit in the case and is unusable until I can find another card, therefore the 9900k may become the HTPC. That leaves me with a gap for my office/workstation which doesn't require a high core CPU (>16) but I do game on it. Already picked up a X570 motherboard but now I'm having second thoughts. The 5950X and 5900X seem like a great workstation part, but the 10900K is close enough in games and still packs 10 cores.