The best CPU for Minecraft server network (dedicated server) (solved: 9900k)

Hello there folks!

I would like to ask for some external opinions on my little research and pain of choice.
My budget is quite strict and I'm looking for the best value-for-money thing, well, as all of us, I guess.

So, below are my options, compared based on three different sources' ratings, and compared by my own understanding of what I need to have as a Minecraft server CPU – higher frequency, and kind of big core counts since I'm going to run a server network from 13+ servers + backend + web hosting.

Now I have a host with 64 RAM and 3700x CPU, and since I do have not a huge amount of players (<30 online) - it's quite an OK solution. But we are moving towards a little expansion so we are about to need more RAM, and with the new host, we can change the CPU as well.

At the moment we have 9 servers for 3 different projects including 2 proxy servers.
Proxy Velocity, most servers core Paper, and a single server run on Fabric.

So, before my "huge research" I was aiming for the 5950x with no doubts. But now.. ugh, that's starting to be a bit challenging.

I'm surprised how i5-12500 with the lowest CPU frequency beating the crap out of all others with higher frequency (based on the last column in the table).

I am also surprised that almost all Minecraft hosting I've checked uses AMD CPUs, so.. I guess they know something that I don't. And not diving into details, I found this fact as a good argument to choose AMD instead of Intel.

It's really hard for me to choose anything here. I'd love to hear any thoughts you have on this. Whether I'm right or wrong, smort or stupid - I'll be glad to hear and take into account any opinion from the outside!

Thank you for your time!

p.s. prices on the screenshot are the average prices (+- 1-2 USD) for the dedicated server with 128 RAM and 2+ TB SSD.
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