Ryzen 5 1600X V.S. Ryzen 7 1700?

IMO, the extra 2 core are worth it for the price. As for gaming performance, you are going to have the same thing. Be sure to design your build in consideration of GPU bottleneck situation. In those situations, AMD is showing equal to the best of Intel.

That means an RX 580 or GTX 1060. Or playing at 1440p or 2160p.

Also, AMD is working better with AMD. So if you purchase a GPU, I would either wait for Vega release at the end of may, or get an RX580/480.

Since you OC, get the Ryzen 7 1700 in this case.

The Ryzen 7 1700 is just as good multithreaded as the Ryzen 5 1600X.
However the Ryzen 5 1500X has higher single thread performamce due to its higher clock. Note that the 3.0 GHz Ryzen 7 1700 can also overclock to >3.6 GHz with an overvoltage of 1.35V, which then it outpaces the Ryzen 5 1500X.

If you dont want to overclock, get the Ryzen 5 1500X as it works well for gaming out of the box with high clocks. But get a cooler as it does not come with one.

The Ryzen 7 1700 is great at stock, but excellent when overclocked. This thing comes with a good stock cooler that can OC the 1700 to at least 1800X levels (>3.6 GHz). An average clock is 3.8-3.9 GHz. From here you are looking at a 30% performance gain from OC alone, and this CPU easily beats the i7 6850K in both single thread and multithread when overclocked well, making it best value for money to you.

I assume you know how to OC as well as its risks and apply reasonable parameters in overvolting and thermals. Good luck with the silicon lottery!

Overclock with after market cooler like the $29 EVO 212 3.9-4.1GHz for all Ryzen. Stock cooler is around 3.7GHz.

Wow...I'm sorry but there's a plethera of misinformation here....

"The Ryzen 7 1700 is just as good multithreaded as the Ryzen 5 1600X" - Ok, not false but its not "just" as good, its much better. 2 more cores/4 more threads better. As such, as you'll be doing rendering work this will pay off big having more threads.

"However the Ryzen 5 1500X has higher single thread performance due to its higher clock." Not really accurate. While the base clock is 3.5 on the 1500X vs the 3.0 of the 1700, they have the same boost clock. Applications that utilize the boost clock effectively will experience the same single thread performance. If you overclock either chip they'll perform the same for single threaded calls.

"From here you are looking at a 30% performance gain from OC alone, and this CPU easily beats the i7 6850K in both single thread and multithread when overclocked well, making it best value for money to you." FALSE. I've got a 1700X here that's clocked to 3.95 and its single CPU score is only 1935 (passmark) which is still less than even a stock 6850K which scores 2156. In multithread score however, yes the 1700(and X) beats out the 6850K due to the extra cores/threads. The gap closes a bith when you OC the 6850K. As a comparison, I've actually got a 6850K here that's OC'd to 4.3 (with ease, and could go further) that scores 16081 in passmark performance test & 2500 single core. My 1700X scores 16216, but in pretty much any mult-threaded application the AMD chip will win big.

Expecting 3.8-3.9 out of a 1700 is realistic, with reasonable voltage. I wouldn't expect to hit 4.0 cleanly, though some have, but it will likely require pretty high voltage. Most folks cleanly running at 4.0, and definitely 4.1, have 1800X's. People claiming to be running 1700s at 4.0/4.1 at under 1.45v are probably not actually running stable though they think they may be. 4.1 on a 1700 is exceptionally rare, at least with reasonable voltage & heat generation. You are not going to hit 4.3-4.5 unless you're on liquid nitrogen and its gonna take a LOT of voltage.

Bottom line is it sounds like the 1700 will be a great choice for you, and OC away. Gigabyte's got some great boards out but ASRock's boards are exceptional. Unfortunately they're hard to get your hands on because they're selling out within a day when they get in stock because they're so feature-rich and have great power phases.

If you're in to the lighting aspect, definitely Gigabyte! I'm running an ASRock X370 Pro Gaming board and functionally its awesome. The wifi is rock solid & I needed dual gig interfaces. However, I came extremely close on pulling the trigger on the Gigabyte Gaming K7 cause I couldn't get my hands on the ASRock board, but finally got it. The K7 seems to do much better with memory clocking than the K5, so personally I'd go K7.