In terms of overall gaming performance, the AMD Ryzen 7 2700X is massively better than the AMD Ryzen R5 1600 when it comes to running the latest games. This also means it will be less likely to bottleneck more powerful GPUs, allowing them to achieve more of their gaming performance potential.

The Ryzen 7 2700X was released over a year more recently than the Ryzen R5 1600, and so the Ryzen 7 2700X is likely to have better levels of support, and will be more optimized for running the latest games.

Both CPUs exhibit very powerful performance, so it probably isn't worth upgrading from one to the other, as both are capable of running even the most demanding games at the highest settings (assuming they are accompanied by equivalently powerful GPUs).

The Ryzen 7 2700X has 2 more cores than the Ryzen R5 1600. 8 cores is probably excessive if you mean to just run the latest games, as games are not yet able to harness this many cores. The cores in the Ryzen R5 1600 is more than enough for gaming purposes. However, if you intend on running a server with the Ryzen 7 2700X, it would seem to be a decent choice.

The Ryzen 7 2700X has 4 more threads than the Ryzen R5 1600. Both the Ryzen 7 2700X and the Ryzen R5 1600 use hyperthreading. The Ryzen 7 2700X has 2 logical threads per physical core and the Ryzen R5 1600 has 2.

Multiple threads are useful for improving the performance of multi-threaded applications. Additional cores and their accompanying thread will always be beneficial for multi-threaded applications. Hyperthreading will be beneficial for applications optimized for it, but it may slow others down. For games, the number of threads is largely irrelevant, as long as you have at least 2 cores (preferably 4), and hyperthreading can sometimes even hit performance.

More important for gaming than the number of cores and threads is the clock rate. Problematically, unless the two CPUs are from the same family, this can only serve as a general guide and nothing like an exact comparison, because the clock cycles per instruction (CPI) will vary so much.

The Ryzen 7 2700X and Ryzen R5 1600 are not from the same family of CPUs, so their clock speeds are by no means directly comparable. Bear in mind, then, that while the Ryzen 7 2700X has a 0.5 GHz faster frequency, this is not always an indicator that it will be superior in performance, despite frequency being crucial when trying to avoid GPU bottlenecking. In this case, however, the difference is enough that it possibly indicates the superiority of the Ryzen 7 2700X.

Aside from the clock rate, the next-most important CPU features for PC game performance are L2 and L3 cache size. Faster than RAM, the more cache available, the more data that can be stored for lightning-fast retrieval. L1 Cache is not usually an issue anymore for gaming, with most high-end CPUs eking out about the same L1 performance, and L2 is more important than L3 - but L3 is still important if you want to reach the highest levels of performance. Bear in mind that although it is better to have a larger cache, the larger it is, the higher the latency, so a balance has to be struck.

The Ryzen 7 2700X and the Ryzen R5 1600 have the same L2 cache size, and the same L3 cache size, so in terms of cache-related gaming performance, we have to look back to the clock rate, where the Ryzen 7 2700X wins out.

The maximum Thermal Design Power is the power in Watts that the CPU will consume in the worst case scenario. The lithography is the semiconductor manufacturing technology being used to create the CPU - the smaller this is, the more transistors that can be fit into the CPU, and the closer the connections. For both the lithography and the TDP, it is the lower the better, because a lower number means a lower amount of power is necessary to run the CPU, and consequently a lower amount of heat is produced.

The Ryzen R5 1600 has a 30 Watt lower Maximum TDP than the Ryzen 7 2700X. However, the Ryzen 7 2700X was created with a 2 nm smaller manufacturing technology. Overall, by taking both into account, the Ryzen R5 1600 is likely the CPU with the lower heat production and power requirements, by quite a wide margin.