When you're gaming, there's honestly less than a 10% performance gap between an i7 running at 4GHz and a Ryzen 5/7 when paired with a mid-range GPU. If your friend has a similar setup and everything is running smoothly, I guess the issue might be on your end—maybe some background processes or a Windows Update are eating up your resources?
There hasn't been much talk about those entry-level A320 motherboards yet, but I guess they won't really be worth picking up over an AMD B350 anyway—at least not until those AMD Ryzen 3 processors hit the shelves, which might be at least three months out.
Man, you managed to pack a whole lot of nonsense into just two lines. I'd say the 1800X is actually the worst value here, since you can easily overclock the cheaper ones to match its clock speeds.
When we look at dollar prices directly in the US, they correlate pretty closely (for example, $249 for the 7600K is roughly $700, and the Ryzen R5 1600 6C/12T at $219 is about $633).
They only really 'stutter' in specific games, and even then, they perform about the same as those cheap, locked i5 chips.
Aside from the Intel Pentium G4560 or the AMD Ryzen 7 1700, trying to buy a new processor and platform right now feels like a bit of a clumsy move.
It’s just about the shipping costs... do you already have a dedicated CPU cooler? If not, you might want to grab one just to make the shipping fee worth it:$15