OT - First off, I don't mean to turn this into the 'INTC spam thread'. If any of the regulars would like me to knock it off, just PM me. 

But this is seriously crazy: the INTC Coffee Lake chips are basically sold out everywhere for the moment. I think it was Newegg that had the 8700k above the list of $359, selling for $380. According to Tom's Hardware, the Coffee Lake chips handily beat AMD's Ryzen comparable offering, the 1700X, regardless of the fact that Ryzen has more cores/threads. INTC has, for one thing, much higher clock speeds. But the price drop on Ryzen 1700X to $299 from $399 does indeed look like it might be a permanent one, and thus the beginning of a damaging price war. I'm hoping it's confined to the high end chips, as a hit from only the gaming enthusiast/power apps might be limited. But it makes more surface sense to expect that the cuts will be across the board, across the linup. And the lower cost chips are likely where the numbers sold start to become huge as boxmakers' bread and butter. 

And here's the seriously crazy part: Microcenter as of today is selling Ryzen 1700X for $269. (One per customer, as 2 raise the price to $329 each.) If you call Staples.com, they'll price match 110% to bring that down to $254.29. And ship it to you free. $380 Coffee Lake vs. $254 Ryzen 1700X, at least for this special. Insane. More than insane: I'm in for 1 at $254.29, despite the fact that I've had all the components to put together a new gaming machine for over year, with a Xeon 5930x processor at its heart, which is now several Intel generations back. No time to put it together yet.  I'll have to look at a gaming performance/comparison. And it's probably worth it to either go wtih Coffee Lake once the hysteria dies down, or wait for a new architecture of AMD chips next year. Part of the current price differential *might* be due to the fact that Coffee Lake includes INTC's integrated HD graphics, given that the majority of users never put in a discrete graphics card (dumb as a stump.), whereas the Ryzen 1700x has no graphics capabilities, commensurate with the assumed gaming/high end productivity intended users.