1) *all* Ryzen chips have beed *unlocked*. None of that dirty Intel 'k' trick for AMD.
2) Ryzen 'x' varieties have better auto-overclocking on a few cores than the non-x, but the diffence between them and the non-x is minimal if you hand overclock.
3) Hand overclocked Ryzen chips *may* lose the ability to auto-downclock to extreme low speeds, meaning your hand overclocked Ryzen may use a few extra watts when idle.
4) With Zen+ (the 2000 series), it is usually better to *not* hand overclock the 'x' parts. The auto-overclocking is that good.
5) Ryzen has the same IPC as the 4000 series Intel parts. And Intel has barely improved IPC since the 4000.
6) if you game at 60Hz, Intel is certainly not better- and indeed the 1% lows on AMD parts are now usually better.
7) if you game at 120-144Hz, Intel may be the 'safer' bet, but the gap is largely closed these days.
8) Zen and Zen+ are more power efficient than Intel until they are heavily overclocked- tho they need to be heavily overclocked to go >4Ghz on more than a few cores. But Intel chips are also very over-stressed if you push all cores >4GHz, which is why all current Intel enthusiasts watercool their CPUs.
9) Zen 2 will significantly reduce Zen power usage under load, and get max clocks on a few cores around 5GHz. For lightly threaded work, Zen 2 will draw level to an heavily overclocked Intel CPU. For multi-threaded work, Zen will continue to crush Intel.
10) for around a decade now, intel has been paying devs to forgo mutli-threading in order to lean on one fast core. But now even Intel parts have 6+ cores, so this corruption of coding has ended. The future is code that supports many cores properly- especially with games now both new consoles are getting 8 Zen2 cores.
A *lot* of people only know Intel- and think Intel a technically advanced company. Well it is not. Intel has *failed* in every business outside its core x86 market- and boy have they tried to diversify. Intel's greatest failure was Larabee- the supposed ATI/Nvidia slaying GPU that Intel developed internally at unthinkable cost (they spent more on this chip than all the R+D spending by Nvidia and ATI combined across their entire history til the data Larabee was cancelled). Intel's 'new' GPU is going to be even worse.
With CPUs, Intel has only looked good when AMD was off the boil. Many youngsters have only ever known this period (AMD's terrible netburst copy- Bulldozer) until Ryzen turned up. And Intel still coasts on this 'reputation'.
But Ryzen was brilliant from the first (I use the 1700, and having had x86 CPUs from Intel, Cyrix and AMD since my first Intel 486DX33, the 1700 has proven to be the cleanest most trouble free system yet).
BTW- Ryzen has *vastly* better hyperthreading than any intel chip- making a big peformance difference. Ryzen's hyperthreading is *safe*. The advice for Intel owners is to turn *off* hyperthreading, cos on an Intel chip the hyperthreading system introduces the most severe from of all the known exploits. This is why Intel now sells most of its new chips without hyperthreading.