Building emulation/gaming PC for $500-$700. Please help.

[rich4721]

This doesn't make any sense,go with the i3-8350 with a good-ish overclock mobo and a simple cooler
It's just ~20% behind in multicore at stock and is on the same level in gaming even with the GTX 1080 and even at the lowest res.
If you want to match the 2600x in multi the i3-8350 allows for 25% overclocking (5Ghz) with a better cooler easily and might even go above that ( ~5.2) .
With the i3-8350 you can upgrade in a few years all the way up to the 8700k,with the 2600x you don't know what you will get in 2020 maybe it's just going to be 10% better (between ipc and clocks) and everything else will be the same,you just don't know,with the FX series the compatibility was the e line that was the same CPUs but downclocked to ridiculously just so they would "fit" into the TDP of the very old ,by then, mobos.
Personaly I would use the i3-8350k at stocks but use intel extreme tuning utility for badly emulated games I would boost one core up to ~5Ghz on those games.
https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/Ryzen_7_2700/19.html
Why do you care about spectre? It's theoretical and while I do understand why companies care because they could potentially loose millions why would anybody single you out?

Also from what I have seen on youtube ryzen only works well will cemu if they use speedhack they speed up the output and you can tell by the music going faster then it should.

I care about Spectre because it is a real vulnerability and shouldn't be taken lightly. I don't think some hacker is going to randomly pick my name out of a hat and then decide to single me out. My concern is that if I'm on the wrong website and I click the wrong link or I get a bad popup or download the wrong thing, that malware could be installed on my PC and take advantage of the Spectre exploit. It is especially concerning because Intel's fixes for Spectre are only through software and there won't be any sort of a hardware fix until Intel's 9th gen processors are released.

Under any other circumstance, I would choose an Intel processor without question.