7700K is fine, 4 core/8 thread at high clock. But 7600K value prop really looks iffy with Ryzen around at similar price points.
4C4T quads have been iffy ever since 2600k started pulling away from the 2500k in tests and games these recent years. It's throwing money down the drain.
7700k is fine for the time being. It'll fall off a cliff in a few years' time, probably before 2020. The writing is on the wall.
People shouldn't make the same mistake those back in the day did when getting their shiny high clocked E8xxx parts, those who bought quads got a lot more mileage out of them before becoming obsolete to better quads like Nehalem and Sandy.
There's a difference now, and it's that the octo cores being the new quads, start at $320 with the R7 1700. You had to pay a price premium back then for a Q6xxx/Q8xxx/Q9xxx over a dual core. Now you don't. It's a no brainer. There's evidence to back this up, now, going back at least to last year and if not part of 2015, that more cores are actually useful. It's not 2010 anymore where the vast mayority of software was single threaded or at most used two threads.
Including RyZen quad cores? A lot of people don't game or do anything more taxing than occasional video or photo work.
Quad cores are the new dual cores. The PC landscape has to move away from the dual/quad era it's been stuck to for the past ten years to the quad/hexa/octocore era as to keep going forward.
How does the average dual core fare today with the increasing demands of web based workloads? Those pages and web apps sure are getting more and more bloated and demanding by the minute. Do you do any demanding computing on a dual core now? No. Will you do any demanding computing on a quad core when the market has done the shift and dual cores are a thing of the past, as were single cores back in the day? Neither.
It's a shame AMD isn't releasing the Ryzen quads and hexa cores along the octo cores, but let's have a look at the rumored pricing. AMD will sell you a beefy quad core starting at the $130 price bracket if the rumored price is true, and they will also sell you a 4C8T quad for $170, again, if the prices are correct. All unlocked. No artificial market segmentation. No artificial feature set limits, you get AVX/2, AES acceleration, etc. Those are the prices a quad should command in this day and age, not the overpriced quads Intel has been selling ever since Ivy Bridge. 2500k was $216, 2600k was $320, those were value propositions. $250 7600k and $350 7700k aren't even accounting for inflation.
The mainstream killer app, games, are now multithreaded. Intel's entire lineup has been obsoleted in performance/$ and pure value/utility overnight with the Ryzen octocores, not to mention the quads and hexas as they are released. The only remaining bright spot is the $65 G4560 at least until Intel gets off greedy monopoly mode and slashes prices here and there. Of course those who need the iGPU will continue to buy Intel, yet we'll see what happens when Raven Ridge arrives, as it's finally an APU with a decent CPU side (4C8T, that's an i7) that could perfectly replace the Ryzen CPU quads.
A healthy AMD brings balance to the
force market. It was sorely needed.