Get Intel now or wait for AMD Zen.

[Stud the Muffin]

I am selling my AMD FX 8370 build; I was getting tired of the problem it was having, especially overclocking and heat. It's listed on eBay as of right now. The BIOS has been reset back to factory settings, so no going back now. I did keep the 2TB Seagate SSHD and the GPU, which is an MSI R9 390. They will be used in my next build.

I use my PC for mostly gaming with light editing, streaming, etc. It must run Windows and Linux well (especially the Linux part).

So my question is, should I go Intel now or wait for AMD's zen CPU?
For the Intel, I was looking at X99, but it was too expensive and there was a lot of variables that could go wrong. Besides, I don't do enough multimedia production for that kind of price point. So I moved to Z170 and the i7 6700k. I was about to buy parts for the z170 on Black Friday, but decided to wait and research. I noticed with both X99 and Z170 motherboards from reputable companies have lower ratings and reviews than their AMD and even older Intel counterparts, I'm guessing it has a lot to do with the quality control issues, bloatware, price, and gimmicks. There is too many motherboard SKUs compared to older Intel generation days. This was one of the biggest reasons I cancelled my z170 purchase. Maybe someone can explain this?

I have been slightly following AMD Zen rumors for a while. From what I see, the IPC is around Broadwell-E level. What caught my eye is the engineering design of Zen. The platform has the chipset on the CPU itself instead of the motherboard, basically SoC, so it's really easy to upgrade to a higher CPU model. AMD is directly handling the CPU microcode update instead of the motherboard manufacturers. I am getting the vibe that AMD is going to be strict on the motherboard manufacturers and not allow nonsense that’s plaguing X99 and Z170. While the SoC sounds great, I can see some problems that can develop.
I appear to be answering my own question, but I want to make sure I am doing the right thing. I have a gaming laptop that can hold me for now.

 

[Supernova1138]

The big question is how long are you willing to wait? Zen isn't going to be available until sometime in January at the absolute earliest, and even then I could see that being a paper launch where there's hardly any chips available, with the prices being horribly inflated as a result for the first month or two while the supply increases. If you sell your current system tomorrow, could you live without a desktop PC for two months or longer? If the answer to that is no, then just go for the 6700k build as that hardware is available now. If you can think you can wait, go ahead, though we still know very little about Zen, other than a single benchmark whose variables are all unknown that may or may not have been specifically optimized for the Zen CPU. Whether that will translate to similar real world performance across a variety of applications remains to be seen.