Alright. was just seeing if your 2500k was no longer working for you. For video encoding you'll no doubt see a big difference. Like I said, the more threads the greater the boost. Since I usually play older games, and don't mind letting something encode overnight, it's just not a big problem for me yet. I was just knocking around the idea of rebuilding rather than troubleshooting (and may still go that route).
What issues are you having? I too mostly play older games which ran mostly fine on the 6870 but I really wanted to play GTA V and it was a very crappy experience. Getting the new GPU sort of put me on the path to upgrade and scratched that upgrade itch so I can at least hold off on fully upgrading for now.
Just random pauses. One to five seconds. Probably a Windows issue, honestly, but if it were the time to upgrade that problem would be fixed in the process.
From what I've read the AMD driver support now is top notch for their newer lineups of GPUs and CPUs. I'd imagine you can't go wrong with either CPU nowadays unless the product is a complete failure ala the first AMD Bulldriver CPUs.
That may be true, but after decades of putting up withe their bullshit I'm done with them. This goes back to the AMD All-In-Wonder Pro. For a great deal of my computing life I've needed two graphics cards to accomplish what I want to accomplish and getting them to play nice was a nightmare. Hell, getting one of them to play nice was. Once I dropped in a 1060GTX and it did what it took two AMD cards to do right out of the box, that was it for AMD. Moreover, the two have a fundamentally different approach to how drivers should work. AMD wants a massive suite that does tons of stuff, and invariably it's hard to find exactly what you're looking for, assuming they even make it available to you. It seemed they wanted you to stay out of the actual settings for your own benefit. Nvidia seems to use a more minimalist and intuitive approach. Something as simple as changing the position of one of your monitors took digging around in Catalyst. It's right in front of you with the Nvidia control panel.
As for AMD vs Intel, what I've been using for the last 9 years was my first Intel build after years of AMD loyalty, and I can safely say I'm never going back. Not only has it been a monstrous overachiever, the driver support is just so much better. It's probably not fair, but my hatred of Radeon has really soured me on AMD across the board.
Well 9 years ago Intel was definitely a better product than AMD. Seems the tide has changed in recent years though. Many people, myself included, have moved from Intel to AMD. I had never used AMD before and typically just would go with a top rated and reviewed CPU that met my requirements (I7 2600k -> I7 6500k -> Ryzen 9 3900x from my last three builds). I don't think you should let your hatred of Radeon hold you back today, you can throw an Nvidia graphics card on an AMD CPU build.
Like Faizoff said, you can't really go wrong with either. AMD might actually have a slight (very slight) edge in performance. Intel is still comparable, and past experience has cause me to like them far, far more than AMD. And as I said, that's after years of being an AMD fanboy. If I cared about 128 FPS vs 124 FPS, perhaps I'd reconsider. That's just never been a thing for me.