AMD Ryzen 5 1600X

Not entirely what I expected

It's Ryzen! AMD comes swinging out of the red corner and finally offers powerful, more energy efficient processors with higher per-thread performance to compete with Intel! Well, so we hoped. Sure, it IS a lot faster than my FX-8320 and paired with DDR4 memory the performance in games IS noticeable, but... I guess I expected more. This processor runs cooler at 4 GHz on a Corsair Hydro H110i than my FX-8320 did at 4.3 GHz with a 212 EVO, but not as much as you'd expect. It's still a pretty warm chip even though it's only 95w at stock boost speeds compared to the FX-8320 at 125w with a slight O.C. Hopefully with liquid cooling and lower TDP I can get some more thermal headroom over the FX-8320 and explore over-clocking it in the future/after the warranty expires. Multi-core performance is great and I can run two monitors simultaneously, one with a game running and multiple tabs open in Opera on the other with office open (I get bored doing homework, judge me) without any noticeable drop in performance. I don't know about it being the "most powerful 6 core gaming processor" as AMD boasts, but it can multi-task very, very well. I don't know if it was just because it was my "luck of the draw" or what, but my unit arrived with a whole row of bent pins- with a steady hand and a dental pick this was remedied over a painful amount of time (this is why I said it wasn't easy to install). it's been a little over a month and there haven't been any problems as a result of this. All in all, I'm happy.