Update: And the editing pass is done. You can now blame me for any remaining errors, though I must admit I skimmed pages 3 and 4 a bit.
I see what appears to be another error on page 2...
"We also tried to boot the chip at 5.6 GHz with a beefier 720mm custom loop, but to no avail."
If they only managed a 4.5GHz overclock, I can't imagine the next logical step would be to jump to 5.6GHz. : D
If you're interested solely in gaming, the Ryzen 3 3300X takes the shine off of purchasing the Ryzen 5 3600, even though the 3600's twelve threads would come in handy for multi-tasking, streaming, and/or recording.
The Ryzen 3600 will still undoubtedly be the better-performing option in the long run though, as games continue to become more heavily-multithreaded, especially seeing as "mid-range" CPUs from both AMD and Intel will be offering 12-threads very soon. Plus, people will often be playing games with other tasks running in the background that may cause increased frame instability in real-world systems that may not be evident in benchmarks done on clean test systems. The 3300X is undoubtedly a good choice for gaming systems on a lower budget, but if one is spending a few-hundred dollars or more on a graphics card, it's probably worth spending the extra $50 for 50% more processor cores.
The 1600AF's limited availability probably disqualifies it from many people's shopping list too. For people building new right now, another significant issue is going to be availability of reasonably priced 3rd-gen-ready B-series motherboards: last time I looked, most were either out of stock or marked up by $20-50.
I wouldn't be surprised if the manufacturers cut back on B450 production, seeing as B550 should be launching next month. It doesn't make much sense to build up a big stockpile of B450 boards if most of those building a Ryzen 3000 system will want the newer boards soon. And while the 1600AF has been a fine processor for the money, I think most would rather pay a little more to trade a small amount of multithreaded performance for a decent improvement in per-core performance, so I kind of doubt its going to stay on the market for very long.
Now, I'm more of the mind to wait for the 4600/B650, especially with most parts either sold out or heavily marked up.
I'm not sure I would wait on B650. If they are only getting around to releasing B550 next month, then I can't imagine a new generation of mid-range boards will be coming within the next year. They might not even release a B650 if the following generation of CPUs ends up breaking backward compatibility. If I had to guess, B550 may be intended as the mid-range board for the Ryzen 4000 generation.
I kind of wonder if AMD might lower their launch prices for a given core count with their Ryzen 4000 processors. Until now, AMD has had a core/thread advantage over Intel at any given price point, but with Comet Lake, Intel will have largely caught up on that metric. A 6-core, 12-thread i5-10400F at around $160 is probably going to provide relatively similar multithreaded performance to a Ryzen 3600, after all, and an 8-core, 16-thread i7-10700F should do the same for the 3700X at around $300. I suspect we will see additional reductions in Ryzen 3000 pricing soon, but Ryzen 4000 pricing might be affected as well, assuming AMD doesn't pull significantly ahead in terms of performance per core with their 4000-series processors.
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