It is a good option but the benchmarks are clear and indisputable.  If you just want gaming, Intel is better, but if you're looking to do more heavily threaded tasks, AMD is better.  There is no "best" option at the moment, both are top of their "game" - they're just playing slightly different games.

Honestly at this point, people claiming shilling and bias one way or another is just a meme and it looks ridiculous

@Ryan_Vickers In pretty much every game I've played, my Ryzen CPU has had excellent performance. In BF5 Beta it actually uses 12 of my 16 threads and is really taking advantage of the cores. I can comfortably stream or record x264 1080p 60fps and play a game simultanously on the same system without any hicups or issues.

Some games like CS:GO are problematic for Ryzen 1st gen (definitely better on Ryzen 2nd gen) cos they don't react well to the increased latency which comes from CCX to CCX communication.

Although realistically speaking, Intel is going to have this problem on their gaming consumer CPUs at some point. When Intel makes the jump to chiplets for CPUs, both AMD and Intel will be equally "bad" at gaming. Which is to say most games will run great whilst some older titles which aren't multi-threaded will suffer.

I don't doubt any of that.  No one's say AMD or Ryzen is bad for gaming.  It's very good.  And if you want to use x264 encoding, it's probably even the better option (didn't they even do a test on that at some point?).  But for the moment, the majority of games don't benefit from more than 8 or even 6 HT cores, or if they do, they don't do so by enough to compensate for the loss of single-threaded performance vs the 8700k.

Intel are just trying to take the spot of Nvidia, they want to give him a new "shill of the year" award

/s

There's a sentiment that Intel does better at gaming. It's definitely less fiddly than 1st gen Ryzen, which, honestly, unless you're willing to do RAM research, I'd avoid.

Again, lagging behind Intel in this case doesn't mean Ryzen is bad, because it very easily holds its own, especially if you make good use of multi-threaded applications.

@Dan Castellaneta Yeah, that RAM situation was not ideal but even I (someone who hasn't traditionally used AMD a lot in the past) had luck with getting my 3200MHz RAM to work on X370. Wendell sums it up very well in his recent video with the guy from puget systems. the issues happening on desktop since AMD has come back in the game are the same ones the server market has been fighting for the last 10 years.