I wish AMD would give me kick backs in the form of a 3950 with a 5700X. The matter of fact is that given the mix usage case, AMD is still better value. You can't run VM and game at the same time without a good thread count. Depending on the software, you want more thread count than speed. Yes, Intel still got the IPC lead but not by much (10% max?). In my case, I'm planning to run a Plex media server and an Android X86 compile VMs while gaming at the same time. That means a 16 thread CPU in a 4/6/6 or 4/12 configuration with at least 32GB of RAM. i9 is at least $100 more than the 3700X and both are tied in most benchmarks. Need more threads, move up to a 3900 which is only $10 more than the i9. Kind of hard to recommend an Intel at the moment.