Well, my Dad got impatient (I didn't help) and he ordered a 10850KA(!)/z490 combo from NewEgg last night at 1am (when all the best decisions regarding online purchases are made) along with some bling RGB ram kit that was on Shell Shocker. Woohoo. Less than $700 after taxes, and he was looking at the 5900x so probably marginally cheaper overall. I know that the 5900x over the long haul will be the much better CPU, but you can't actually buy it right now and that leads me to...
We are *probably* going down there for Thanksgiving and I can build it out then. Zen 3 supplies are probably super tight through the end of the year at least (I am thinking) and at this rate we may not see them for Christmas or into early next year. Got to do it now so he can enjoy the winter gaming time (he's a farmer, so it's really seasonal) with new hardware. The pandemic just keeps giving.
I never expected to be building a i9 based PC any time soon, but here we are. It should handily outperform his 5820k which was always a terrible clocker. Given the TDP on that thing, this is like a sidestep and I'll set PL1 to like 88W (haha, get it?) and PL2 to ~140W since he has a 150W BeQuiet! aircooler and and Corsair that is built for airflow.
Competition at least pushed better pricing and some more exotic configurations. Haha, 10C/20T Intel for ~$430 ($400 at MC)!?? And a gosh darned bundled game?