Ryzen

I have in my possession a Ryzen 5 1600 with a gift receipt.

Why should I keep it and not return it or exchange it for credit towards some flavor of Ryzen 7 CPU? What Ryzen 7 should I even get?

depends on what you're doing with it. r5 1600 is the best price-for-performance cpu for gaymen AND multicore workloads AT that price. if you want to move up to ryzen 7 then get the 1700 because its similarly very good value in that price range for that amount of cores.
if all you want to do is shitpost and play games then a goytel i5 is going to beat it marginally in performance. but keep in mind you'll have less flexibility with what you want to do, less overclocking ability because of using salad cream for thermal paste and a platform/socket with planned obsolesence.

Return that unstable garbage and get an Intel

>D-DELID DIS!!!

I do some modeling/number crunching for astrophysics studies, some gaymen, and video encoding/editing as a bit of an amateur hobby.

I'm wondering how much I'll really get out of a 1700 for what I use though.
Never reply to me again unless you're contributing to the thread. This is your first and FINAL warning.

if your workloads are highly parallel, which they sound like they are (especially video editing) then you will always benefit from more cores. consider that more cores that are clocked slightly lower will be faster than less cores clocked higher because there will be less context switching between different processes/threads. you can always overclock to get more performance in games that are still relying on single thread performance. it's just that the difference in price between the 1700 and the 1700X is just not worth it when you can make up that difference with overclocking.

I can reply to you because I'm using a superior processor, instead of a chinese-knockoff like 'amd'

>thermal jizz in $2k CPUs
Scholomo pls.

1600 should be great. However, If you're willing to spend a little bit extra the 1700 won't disappoint.

>intel processors synthesised by globalist jewish schemes
>amd processors are purebred american
oy vey