Question about Intel Core i7-7740X X-Series

The i7 7800X is clearly better, has 2 more cores and is also overclockable. The i7-7740X is a pretty stupid CPU. It has the same performance as an i7-7700K, you just pay twice as much for the motherboard.

Basically, I would rather go for a Ryzen 7 1700(X). It has at least as much performance as an i7 7800X when overclocked, although it costs the same as an i7-7740X/i7-7700K.

I don't know these two processors in particular, but it is often the case that a processor with a higher clock frequency and fewer cores is much faster when gaming, for example, than a processor with more cores and a lower clock frequency. Benchmarking is not the same as a real application, e.g. a game. Games cannot be divided into any number of threads or cores: Graphics, sound, game physics, etc. But the graphics thread should be clocked as high as possible, because that is where the bottleneck is. This is more useful than more cores/cores if the graphics thread/core is clocked lower. These are general principles. That's why I would take the previous speaker's answer with a grain of salt and seek an opinion elsewhere first.

And the question is whether you want to overclock your processor yourself or run it at the default clock speed. If the latter, I tend to go for more clock than more cores, although this is relative and the question is how much higher clock vs. how many more cores. if the two processors are otherwise identical, the +0.8 GHz higher clock frequency would be worth more to me than two more cores. Another principle: the more threads/cores, the greater the management cost/performance loss due to coordination overhead.