Yeah Gamers Nexus seems to be very focused testing, basically a PC is a closed gaming box to him where users do nothing else and build according to that. He also focuses completely on the now will little forethought to the future. It's understandable as he does mention how workloads are changing in gaming but he specifically deals with what's the current situation.
His R5 review must have been very painful for him as you can tell he basically doesn't want to admit that the i5 is dead as a gaming CPU, it was like pulling teeth reading his conclusion and even in the end his label is "i5 hangs on with fading grasp"?? "If CPU rendering is your thing..." ?? Really? You can tell just how biased he is towards Intel and that's bad.
I don't like how much attention he puts on BF1 benchmarks when all he does is run the built-in one, which is completely irrelevant for the game. He should not include the game at all if he doesn't want to bother with multi-player. I can play BF1 and process a h265 video in handbrake running in the background, let's see him do that on his beloved 7700k.
Most of his audience are interested in gaming performance; I know that that's the number one concern in my case, but you are still pretty much wrong about his conclusions. He also does a number of CPU tests, including blender and x.264. His problem is that in most of those applications, GPU acceleration through CUDA is available, making CPU choice pretty much negligible. He's obviously strongly considering how Ryzen would perform in his creation pipeline (most of his non-gaming CPU tests are centered around content creation), and it's clear that he has personally no real need for Ryzen, despite its capabilities.
I'd also like to address your point about changing workloads. It is true that games will start using more cores over time, but I remember before Ryzen's launch seeing
this Computerbase article as proof that games are already able to take advantage of Ryzen. As far as I'm concerned, that conclusion still holds. If Ryzen did perform properly in games, we would see the 1800X literally topping Computerbase's benchmark charts, rather than the
6900K being 12% ahead considering its Cinebench, Blender and Handbrake performance coupled with its clock speed advantage. I think this argument that Ryzen is going to improve over time to be a bit weak. We're already in a situation where 6-8 cores should have an advantage over a mainstream i7 in games.
You can say that the i5 is dead as a gaming CPU, but the results of his testing don't bear that out. I agree that the 1600/X have that bracket pretty much cornered, but the i5 still seems to perform pretty much on par.
To your comment about playing BF1 and processing and h.265 video: firstly, have you actually done that, and not as a benchmark or an exercise, but because you actually wanted to play BF1 while encoding a video? Second, how many people do you think that use case applies to?
I can tell you that there are many use cases that I have personal experience with where I would rather have a heavily overclocked i5 over a 1600X. Specifically, I can tell you that emulators love single-thread performance, and Skylake still holds a clear advantage in that use case. Emulators are something that I actually use, too. I love playing Mario Galaxy and Rogue Squadron with Dolphin, having actually finished both of them on PC. Also, I know I would rather have an i5 if I want to play a heavily modded Bethesda game, such as Skyrim or Oblivion, which I have, on Steam alone, 540 combined hours in. These use cases exist too, and are actually relevant to me.
It's all going to come down to what you use the CPU for, and it's clear that what Steve Burke uses his CPUs for aren't where Ryzen makes a huge difference, so naturally he judges it mostly on the workloads that are top priority of the greater part of his viewers (gaming). That's not to say that there are uses where a Ryzen rig is going to shine. I know that if I were a streamer or any kind of video producer that I would pick up a 1700, but not everyone needs what it has to offer.
The bolded is such garbage. In fact, I'd say in it's garbage in almost every case, not just this one. Just a weak rationalization to suppress information or discredit people for whatever reason. I see no evidence that GamersNexus has any bias in their coverage, they just came to a different conclusion than you.
One final question: How does one deal with any situation other than the current one?