Half-Life Alyx has me considering a VR capable build (RIP my wallet).
logicalincrements.com is showing all AMD processors except the i9-9900K which seems comparable to the much less expensive Ryzen 7 3700X.
I guess I just need reassurance that AMD is the way to go. I'd be sticking with a Nvidia GPU.
Ryzen 5 2600x here. The only driver issue I've experienced was due to initially using windows 8, which was not supported. I've had little issue navigating their wizards and apps with my minimal amount of software experience. I have a similar build to killbills, with a msi b450. My chip is at a stable OC of 4.2.
No, the only issue I had was with a very long boot time until I disabled the boot logo(some company who is behind the titanium branding on this motherboard) in bios settings. Also because MSI chose to put a 16mb bios memory chip on B450 boards I'm limited to a lite bios(no fancy graphics) Their new Max branded b450's and above don't have this issue.
The advice I heard and followed was to not download chipset drivers from the bios manufacturer and to get them direct from AMD, which I did. The utility worked fine and updated 4 drivers at once(sound, ethernet, etc) and it was only afterwards that I was able to select Ryzen Balanced plan from Power options.
So yea, I'm really happy with performance. I was worried as well since I've been with Intel since 2012 without issue but it's all been smooth sailing.
I have the baseline 6 core r53600 and it really runs well. I did some short benchmarks on it and it runs at 4.2ghz as advertised under load on all cores. I was somewhat surprised by this initially since others were struggling to replicate that. It seems to me that these new AMD cpu's are tuned pretty well out of the box and enabling some of the OC/Enthusiast functions can actually impair performance, rather than enhance it. That's just from observing different results over a month or two though mainly on the reddit subs. The AMD people say similar things also. Some of the early motherboard bios have been less than stellar which might have contributed to that.
I went with 6 cores as this time because I plan to upgrade again in 3 years and use this one as a linux movie/streaming hub. If you want it to last longer I'd recommend going 8 core minimum to match the upcoming 8 core consoles which most devs will be optimising for. Paying a bit extra in 2012 for a 4 core cpu paid off for me and I'd still be using that if the PSU didn't make my choice for me and take out the MB with it.
FWIW, I'm using a b450 Mortar Titanium and I'm on the latest Ryzen Balanced Plan in power settings after installing the windows driver package from AMD. I also went for a new 550w PSU and 16g of 3200c16 ram.