Your link is testing games. That and every similar channel are just fake. So don't pay any attention.
Look, I don't know what the exact sweetspot is for number of threads in regards to context switching, but cores themselves are irrelevant when it comes to gaming performance. Actually, scrap the gaming part, it's irrelevant to any kind of performance. What matters is the overall "horsepower" (for lack of a better word) of the CPU and having enough threads (not cores, threads) to avoid the penalty of switching threads. Which means, 6c/6t and 4c/8t with the same overall performance (say CBR23 score) should perform identical in games with a slight lead for the 8t part.
I hardly ever see those channels - which is why I said random link. But the results mirror most of the tests i've seen, the 9600K seems to be significantly faster than 7700K in some games when it comes to 1% lows while performing the same in others - pretty much what I expected. But this discussion about 6c6t and 4c8t is for another day, we can agree to disagree about 4c8t being faster than 6c6t. I believe there's more to it than the penalty of switching 'threads' because of the way HT works and windows does scheduling. I guess I can fire up a game that's hard on the CPU and run 4c8t, 6c6t on the 9950x and see what happens.
I also know that cores don't 'matter' in the sense that the actual performance is all that matters at the end. But we can only compare the quad core CPU's that have been released in the past and compare it to their 6 core counterparts, or do what HUB did in the link I posted and chop cores from the same CPU to demonstrate scaling. And it clearly shows that 4>6 cores yields a significant boost in his titles. And the simulation games that are harder on the CPU demonstrate the same, just amplified. So the quad core CPU's that have been released in the past are starting to show their age, regardless of HT or not. Hypothetically the number of cores shouldn't matter, but when you're presented with 4 or 6 of the same cores released in the past, it does seem to for games nowadays.
1) I already said if it was me I'd go with the 5700X3D
2) I don't see where
@JustBenching said the 7700k was not going to be bottlnecked. He stated a different path because of the older games (not the path I would go) but I don't see him saying not to upgrade the CPU at all
"use it on your 7700k then proceed with upgrading your CPU if the need is there."
3) I posted an article with 6c/6t running into some issues. For the most part the 8600k & 7700k offered similar performance across tests suites. The 9600k was a slightly faster 8600k but otherwise the same CPU. Will there be some games that run better on 6c/6t than 4c/8t and vice versa? Sure, you can always cherry pick games.
I was referring to 7700K > 9600K from his quote, i didn't say he said a 7700k won't be a bottleneck.
See, this discussion of ours only started because we were talking about the 7700k but you linked a 8600k review. All I mentioned it's 6 core and not 4 and you ranted about how cores don't matter and I should educate myself. But the HUB article I linked clearly demonstrates that 6 cores are faster in the same CPU vs 4 with everything else being the same, so 8600K
should be faster than 7700k (a bit less so than HUB's as 8600K boosts a bit lower but still). Some others also provided reviews where quads struggled - i guess it all really depends on the games. Which brings me to the initial point I made and i'll leave with the same - quad cores are fine if the games you play are running well on it. But there's a real case nowadays where they might be a bottleneck and cause a stuttery mess so best to check reviews before sticking to it - especially the 1% lows! But you want to play any game you throw at it, getting at least 6 cores is a safe bet.
