Similarly, I am giving it a few months to get beat up by the gamers and figure out which motherboards are actually stable.  So many times processors get a bad rap for what are actually MB or some kind of system combination stability problem.

I have been waiting a long time for the AM4 platform and can give it a bit more time.

Depending on how things go, I might do a father and son build of this thing with a modest video card, then let him take the best parts of both systems as his new game rig - end of the year Christmas gift.


 

The IPC figures for Ryzen are well above what the older AMD architectures can do, so it'd be worthwhile purely as a future-proofing exercise. I think Linux from 4.10 onwards plays better with Ryzen than Windows does (apparently) - the newer the better really in this case.

The chips are also 14nm and should run cooler than the other AMD options. If you don't need 8 cores / 16 threads and the performance they can bring, then wait for the R5 and/or R3 series to come out, they should be even cheaper and still quite good choices. Furthermore, if you prefer the APU approach, then I think the Zen-based ones should be coming out in late 2017, by which time both Linux and Windows should have far fewer bugs. On top of this, whatever platform the APUs come with should be far more future-proof than current AMD APUs.

I'm of the firm opinion that more cores (and therefore more threads) is a Good Thing; I was slightly ridiculed for this when I bought the old Q9550, turns out I was justified to do so in the long run since I only replaced it a couple of months ago.

So... tldr, wait until late 2017 and decide then, the picture should be much clearer then.

Ryzen 5's out

- still too rich for my blood starting at ~US$170/Can$226 for the 4-core model (the Athlon II 845 4-core 3.5G is 60 Canadian pesos)