ryzen 5 1600, B350 and 1060 6gb vs. i3 8100, z370, and 1060 3gb

I see no glaring issues with YOUR list.
Even the Corsair CX650 doesn't seem as bad as suggested. Here's a review for the CX650M (modular cables) which should be the same otherwise:
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/corsair-cx650m-psu,4770-11.html

Some points:
1) R5-2600 is better yes, but not sure of the local price and budget. May not be worth it if the price increases much.
"This time when compared to the Ryzen 5 1600 the 2600 was 8% faster out of the box and 7% faster once both CPUs are overclocked to the max."

Under gaming that may shrink to almost NOTHING depending on where the bottleneck is so there may be better places to spend the money if budget is tight.

2) make sure the DDR4 memory you choose is known to work at its rated speed with the exact motherboard (if you can't find out stick with Corsair or G.Skill as that should increase the odds, then update the BIOS to latest if not up to date)… the memory YOU chose seems fine though you may be limited to 2933MHz. As long as it's not lower you should see minimal to no CPU losses.


3) I agree VRAM amount matters a lot, especially for the long-term as games continue to use more. 3GB isn't enough to prevent stutters in some games at specific settings. So yes, a GTX1060 6GB should be a good balance of performance to budget.

4) the R5-1600 should perform similarly to the i3-8100 in most things NOW but the extra cores/threads it has will benefit specific programs that can utilize those cores/threads now and of course in a few years more games/programs will utilize those cores/threads better.


The R5-1600 at 4.0GHz has up to (roughly) 60% more performance over the i3-8100. Again games should be pretty close or identical if the GPU (not CPU) is the bottleneck.

PASSMARK is not 100% accurate (since in part it varies by application) but it's a good rough guide:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+5+1600&id=2984
vs
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i3-8100+%40+3.60GHz&id=3103

What you see is the SINGLE CORE (one core usage matters a lot still in gaming as the main game code thread may be a choke point regardless of how many cores the CPU has to run game sub-threads) is close at default but overclocking the R5-1600 should end up pretty close to the i3-8100... what gets really interesting is the TOTAL performance if software can use all cores/threads and it's way higher with the R5-1600 since it has six cores and each core can add another thread of code (at closer to 30% advantage with the hyperthreading).

The extra cores also help when OTHER software kicks in when gaming to prevent specific stutters.