For the price, I can blow up 2 and half Ryzen 1600's overclocking them to be nearly a 1700.  I pulled the trigger and went with water cooling so I can overclock this one to hell. If I blow it up, I'm still in it for less than a 1700+. 

1800X - had a deal where buy the cpu and motherboard and get 100.00 off.  Besides that they were out of the one i was after which was the 1600. So basically your post inspired me to well ...yeah...New build

Have you overclocked at all or is that stock settings?

Which CPU is that Grunt?

That computer uses the 1600.  It's sort of hard to compare it to my main system (Ryzen 1700X) because the 1600 computer is a Linux box.  However, the Handbrake conversions I do on the 6/12 core 1600 are OBVIOUSLY faster than my older computer.  That was a 6-core Athlon, but was showing its age for  sure.  So multithreaded stuff should rock.  I was shocked with Rift honestly.  I was used to getting 30fps in the crowded areas, but on this 1700X system with a GTX1070, I get over 100fps.  The difference is night/day.

I don't have Passmark on the 1600 Linux system, but here's a screenshot of my Win10 1700X system.  The CPU is at the 97th percentile.  My memory could be better; still limping alone with my fast memory only clocked at 2133MHz.  I'm hoping there'll be more relief there with future BIOS updates.  But at least the last one unlocked better overall performance in windows (it was already good). (lol, I just realized I did that passmark while I have UO running in a VM mining on Rebirth... crazy)

But for bang/buck, you just can't beat the 1600.  I wish I could tell you how it "feels" in Windows.  After I got past my memory woes on both systems, things have been smooth.

Oh, cooler.  I'm running the stock cooler that comes with the CPU.  I did actually buy a much bigger cooler, but frankly I haven't needed it.  I converted a whole bunch of movies  from MKV to H264 so they'll play on my Rasberry Pi  Plex server.  It chugged through 20 bluerays taxing all cores and I didn't even hear the fan go crazy.  The 1600 runs cool it would seem.  I guess I'll keep the large cooler in the box.  I did have a problem when I first put the fan on, because I didn't fully tighten the fan to the motherboard.  I came home to find it locked up and that's actually why I purchased the larger fan.  But then I discovered the error and corrected it.  No problems since then; and that includes a 99 degree day here already.

He's come a long way since I last peaked in.