Ryzen 5 5500 is a $159 6 core chip.

i3-12100f is a 100$ 4 core chip, which should line up with Ryzen 3 4100 at $100 or possibly Ryzen 5 4500 at $129.

5500 is 199$ "Price Street", MSRP is dead for a long time especially for TSMC products.

12100f is $178 right now at Newegg (shipped by third party; Newegg has none): https://www.newegg.com/intel-core-i3-12100f-core-i3-12th-gen...

118 usd after VAT here in EU

I can get a 5600x for $210. There is no way the 5500 will be anywhere near close to $199.

How much more expensive are Intel motherboards though?

Intel boards baseline around $80[1] and AMD boards around $50[2].

[1]: https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100007627%20601394305%20601361...

[2]: https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100007625%20601292786%20601312...

For Intel, those are the cheapest of the cheap boards with the very limited H610 chipset. If you want something acceptable you will pay a lot more. AMD on the other hand has cheap good option with B550 or even B450.

DDR4 boards are in the same ballpark as AMD.

I am interested in your belief that most builds needs GPU more than CPU, or that most builds even have GPUs. iGPUs have ~70% of the market. Most builds are going to spend the cash on CPU performance.

If you're buying the CPU separately, it means you'll be building the PC yourself, not a prebuilt. Upgrading the GPU instead of the CPU will give you better graphics performance, which is what most of the people building one want. The only reason iGPUs have such a large section of the market is because of people buying regular prebuilt to use as a general computer, not a gaming one.

That's not obviously true to me. Is graphics-intensive gaming - and I would point out that defining "gaming" as GPU-intensive would be too narrow - really that large of a market? I've personally built dozens of PCs and the last time I bought a GPU it was a 3DFX Voodoo.