To be fair, bringing up techpowerup benchmarks is worst idea.
I do have R7 1700 3,8GHz, 3200 MHz DDR4. In BF1 at 720p ultra I do not get bottlenecked by R7. I was quite surprised when I saw these numbers, did not match any reviews. I couldn't believe it.
I do have RX 480. No when I do screen scale to 50% I do get cpu bottlenecked it its really rare to see drops below 110-130FPS with AMD GPU and 8GB of DDR4 in DX11 - ULTRA. CPU usage is sometimes insanely high 60-70% depends on map we are playing. ( I believe that i7 8700K wont drop below 130-140fps in same scenario).
To say that Ryzen is not capable of 144Hz gaming is pure b*llshit. Ryzen is fast, very fast and yes i7 will beat it. But there is a thing where you play SP, empty map or 64p. As a casual gamer I love battles, big battles (I hate, if frame drop occurs during the battle). I want 128 player map as soon as possible.
Most intensive are 64 operations. I did see i5 in 64p operations, barely capable producing 60-70 fps (GTX card DX11) with worst frametime and dropping below 45-50fps - playable, but no enjoy.
What people is saying about SMT (R5 1600X and i5 8400) is exactly what we were talking about 5 years ago with i5 and i7. Your money, your choice.
Personally I would definitely go with AMD, because Intel is messing around to much. AM4 is great socket and will be supported for 3 generations.
Who will upgrade on 4 year old MB, why not buying new system (wait for DDR5 or something)?
This is the question and always it is good to have more choices. AMD might give you HBM CPU, HBM APU in 2020-2021 for AM4. Imagine fast 8C with 16-32GB of fast and low latency HBM CPU or APU? If people would have choice to upgrade on Z170 (i5-i7) to i7 8700K would have been great deal.
And please do not tell me those bullshit stories, about pin layout, how Intel needs more power for CPU. It could be done by software.
For causal gamer who likes to enjoy gaming new games, do not buy CPU with 4 threads, buy R5 1600 or i5 8400. Totally worth it.
PS: All those people who say that SMT/HT is bad for gaming, please let them try to disable it on i3/pentium g4560. Its all about optimization and sometimes to many threads can hurt.