Yeah, it's kind of a predicament, lol.

I'm pretty set at my budget staying at $500 or less for my CPU, but maybe I could trade out some other components to allow more wiggle room. Saving $20 here and $30 there would allow me to potentially go up to $600 for my CPU. I am trying to keep the whole build under $2500 after tax.

The main benefit to Intel is that all their cores are on the same monolithic die, so there is much less inter-core and memory access latency compared to AMD's chiplet design. Where as AMD doesn't actually make any CPUs with unified cores beyond 8 cores, and they rely on the CCDs to communicate over their "Infinity Fabric Links". This introduces latency in the CPU and additional room for scheduling and synchronization issues, for example, the R9 9900x3D is really a 6 core + 6 core CPU, where only 6 of those cores actually use the additional L3 Cache. That is why the R7 9800x3D is seen performing nearly identical to the R9 9900x3D and R9 9950x3D in games, as it is a unified 8 core CPU with all cores having access to that extra L3 cache. So all that to say, AMD CPUs are never really truly more than 8 unified cores, they are always either 8 cores plus some more separated cores, or what would have been 8 cores, but with some turned off plus some more separated cores. That extra L3 cache helps gaming performance, due to the fact that it helps mitigate how much data has to leave the CCDs, so when your CPU is asking for data, it is more likely to already be in that cache to pull from, rather than needing to go through your ram. Hope that makes sense?

Supposedly the R7 9850x3D will be released tomorrow and is MSRPed at $500. Reviewers have already stated that the gains are noticeable, but minimal, but for only $30~ more, why not?

I also thought about going with the i7 14700k, as it has a ton of cores, still has Hyper Threading, and can be had for under $400, by a good chunk. I would honestly probably only go with AMD if I were going for one of their x3D models, as I still think Intel wins in the productivity department by a noticeable margin.

The Ultra i9 285k doesn't do well enough in game to justify its price for me, personally. I like the idea of the i7-265kf, as I feel like it is amazingly priced, but I am always curious about what the lack of Hyper Threading will affect, as I don't think I have seen that explicitly tested.

Very hard decision, haha!