Thanks for the responses. I might snag a 5800x3d. I have 2 other AMD systems so I will do a CPU hand-me-down situation and 1 CPU purchase = 3 upgrades. I doubt all the extra cores do me much good the only thing I do that takes any sort of real resources is gaming and occasional video transcoding. Gaming is the priority however.

Valken:

Someone please recommend a good MB that can OC the memory DDR4 up to 4000 1:1 so I can be ready to buy one IF it can be found here. If not, I'm just gonna go ADL F series with blck B660 MB option.

pretty much all of the 500 series chipset boards are capable of 4000 +, the primary limitation is the memory controller on the cpu, I've not seen a single board that can't do >4400 with an ryzen apu installed. only time will tell if these new chips are capable of higher fclks or not. Its really a shame that there aren't any ddr4 alderlake boards with an external bclk as far as I've seen, would be a winning bang for buck combo.

They'll likely charge too much for quite a small gain since there's only one 3d version released a lot of people will try to buy it. Too bad. The new AMD knows have to cash it in.

It would be interesting if they'd make "gaming" CPUs like this more in the future. Where we don't see much of a gain in 12 or 16 cores and it's more about IPC and cache. But due to the old-school product segmentation, the high core count CPUs are at the top of the bin because that is just how it has to be. They're the flagship product, so their performance must be the best across the board. Maybe now we can start to see that change a bit, and we can get high performance in the middle. Probably not, because it'll look weird on some slides and people will be confused why they have to pay double to get less performance in those other benchmarks.