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Maybe I missed this, but what makes these "gaming" CPUs?

They don't seem to have any specific feature (other than just generally good performance) that would make them specifically better for gaming.

The gaming part comes from single thread / low thread count performance. For instance, in many games, having a lower ST perf means losing frames by "bottlebecking" the system.
It's largely the lack of anything specific that marks it as a gaming part. The Ryzen chips are AM4 socket and have 24 PCIe lanes and dual channel RAM.

It's slightly smooshing the line between Consumer/Desktop parts and High-End Desktop (HEDT) parts, but AMD's HEDT/Workstation CPUs are Threadripper on the TR4 socket and have 64 PCIe lanes and quad channel RAM, and its Workstation/Server are Epyc on the SP3 socket with 128 PCIe lanes and 8 channel RAM.

(There may also be more specific stuff WRT how it handles threads and memory. Threadripper has a specific gaming mode that basically shuts off half the chip to simplify threading and optimize memory access for software, at the expense of having less resources available overall. Not seen a hands-on with the Ryzen 3000 chips that covers NUMA/UMA etc, but as it's only dual channel I don't think it'll be required. YMMV, IANAL.)