My only qualm is that purchasing an i7 7700 system in comparison to a Ryzen 1700 system is almost the same price (since I'm buying my CPU from MircoCenter).

The use of my desktop is maybe 5% gaming, the rest is software dev and browsing, isn't there still a reason to prefer an IPC advantage for compilers and other system tasks?

I mentioned this, because I don't think a 12 core CPU would really give me that much more productivity or value gain than an i7 7700 or Ryzen 1700.

I only really need a single linux compatible nVidia GPU, enough cores and ram to comfortably handle 20 browser tabs, an IDE and a relatively hefty docker dev flow.