I think you haven't watched the reviews with sufficient attention.
The difference between that 1700 overclocked (which is basically an 1800X) and 3700X is quite significant. Especially in games.
Looking at 15-20% difference between Ryzen 1000 and Ryzen 3000 in per/core performance (with an even bigger diff when looking at single thread clocks .... (up to)4000 vs 4400 in older titles.
Add on top of that double the AVX power for some professional workloads, and Ryzen 3700X vs 1700 is like the difference between an old Core 2 Quad and a much newer Skylake (same cores, but MUCH faster).
Oh, and it consumes half of the power.
But I feel you, I wouldn't upgrade either an 8-core to another 8-core.
You should get the 3900X when it's in stock
I'm judging based on TPU's review here:
AMD's $330 Ryzen 7 3700X is an 8-core, 16-thread CPU that's clocked high enough to compete with Intel's offerings. Actually, its application performance matches even the more expensive Intel Core i9-9900K. Gaming performance has been increased significantly, too, thanks to the improved...
www.techpowerup.com
AC: odyssey - 98.6 VS 115.3
BF:V - 142.8 VS 173.3
Civ VI - 155.8 VS 182.7
FC5 - 93.9 VS 118
ME - 134.1 VS 168.3
rage 2: 230.4 VS 237.4
sekiro - 122.5 VS 151.3
Tomb raider - 205.3 VS 247.8
witcher 3 - 213.4 VS 224.9
wolfenstein II- LOL vs LMFAO
Now, these are 720p settings. We can see that in Wolfenstein, witcher, tomb raider, rage 2, civ vi and BFV the framerate difference doesnt matter. At all. All of these results are over 144 FPS (except BFV, which is 1 frame off, close enough) so unless you are using a 165hz monitor the chip makes no difference.
AC; odyssey, far cry 5, metro, and sekiro all show large differences in favor of the 3700x, but that brings in the other bugbear. Subjectively, to me, this makes no difference, because my 1440p monitor's freesync range is only 35-90 FPS, so anything above 90 makes no difference to me. Speaking of 1440p, look at the results there, and you will see:
Wow. A whopping 5% faster! I was right on the money. As someone who games at a modern resolution, the 3700x is only about 5% faster then the chip I have right now. And in the 2 games that show a big difference between the 1700 OC and the 3700x, both are above the 90 FPS I need to max out freesync.
So, for me, the 3700x is meaningless as it has 0 OC headroom to improve those numbers, and the 1700x is good enough to keep 90 FPS in every title out today. This may change in the future, but at the moment my vega 64 doesnt come close to maintaining 90 FPS in most titles at 1440p, so until a navi 5900xt comes out or I splurge on a 3080ti whenever it comes out, its a pointless exercise in which CPU is faster. Zen 3 may finally offer a large enough difference for me to care, but that will likely be on a different socket.
Trust me, I've been paying attention. In realistic scenarios, the 3700x is barely any faster then my OCed 1700. If I needed to upgrade, the 2700 is much cheaper then a 3700x and can still be OCed to 4.5-4.6 GHz, and based on the 2700x results from the same graphs, that would close any gap with the 3700x. The only reason the 3700x would be exciting is if you wanted to pus 144 FPS constantly, but then you'd be better off with intel.
I should have just bought the 2700 when I built this thing. I was hoping the 3700x would be a bigger step forward like the 2700 was from the 1700.
