I'd honestly take this over AMD's offerings, mainly because:
- HEVC advantage, optane and TB3
- lower idle consumption and better overclocking experience
(unlike the sterile, meaningless and incremental one on AMD's zen cpus)
- none of the countless problems faced by AMD mobos and memory
- super ST performance, being more reflective and reliable in today's usages
- superior gaming experience
- availability of ITX option - Asrock X299-ITX/Server counterpart
- AMD's lack of optimization in windows
So many unmentioned advantages. I say its a good placeholder until the actual zen response (Tiger-Lake/Ice Lake) arrives. Kudos to AMD for catching up to Coffeelake though.
I own/have owned both intel and AMD mainstream and HEDT platforms in the last two years. I have to disagree with all but your first point. TB3 was the biggest pain for me, Would’ve been useful several times now on my X399 workstation.
As to everything else, if you’re gaming at 1440p or 4K - you do not notice the difference. If anything, my current X399 build seems to have more consistent FPS (“smoother”) at 4K vs my previous AM4 or Z270 builds. SIngle threaded performance is a terrible metric to build a system around FYI - the tasks and applications that are truly single-threaded are mostly the stuff of benchmarks now. ITX isn’t realistic with X399 due to the size of the socket. Windows optimizations / lack thereof had much to do with NUMA vs UMA and this has been resolved for Zen 2.
Overclocking is where I have to disagree most. Zen overclocking has more to do with building a custom cooling solution, tweaking PBO options / wattage / scalar, and many hours of memory adjustment and testing. To do it well is harder than bumping vcore and cranking the multiplier on a mainstream intel board - this is especially true regarding the memory.