I had an i7-7700k for 4-5 years, and when I got my 2080 Super I had to push that old i7 to a heavy overclock to get as much performance from it as I could. So I had been looking to upgrade my CPU for a while. Of course the debate came up if Ryzen was better or if Intel should even be considered. I'll admit, I still like Intel in my heart, but I wasn't getting 11th Gen, its expensive for basically no more performance. But the 10850k had come out just in the last year, for less than the 10900k but with the same performance. Mix that with it being cheaper with the 11th Gen announcements, and there being great looking and performing mobos for it (and 11th Gen) I bought this.Honestly, I gotta say, it does what it promises. It has 10 cores that can run like a beast. It has my 2080 Super performing at its best without the sweat and strain my 7700k had to. I had to push that 7700k to 5.2 Ghz, where I could feel it straining, to really see RTX gaming performance at its smoothest above 1080p. This 10850k boosted just from the base BIOS on my mobo to 4.8Ghz on all 10 cores and things are buttery smooth. I play Control at 1440p with maxed settings and get a fairly consistent 90 FPS and my temps and component usage are all nice and ideal levels. I was able to play Half-Life Alyx, and stream it while capturing my webcam footage without any temp issues and honestly hitting my VRAM cap on the GPU before any actual performance issues from bottlenecking.Honestly, I can't be happier with this purchase. I hate reviews without negatives, it feels fake. And I wish I had some, but seriously it is playing games I enjoyed before with far better performance at higher settings. It is handling my crazed multitasking and occasional streaming without a sweat. Ryzen 5000 series may be able to squeeze some better gaming performance overall than this. But at the price I got it, and the issues with availability of a 5800x (which is more expensive too) I couldn't say I'd be happier with that. Especially when the AMD motherboards don't look quite as nice either. My friend has a 5800x, I've played on his machine and heard from him in his own use that its good, but nothing there seemed to blow this 10850k out of the water.