Here's a hypothetical, you have a buddy who is choosing between getting a 7950X or a 9950X for production workloads, and after listening to the reviews you finally want some objective info to help him (or her) make an informed choice.
Don't worry, I will get to telling you why I think the reviewers are in dire need of a proctologist, because their heads are so far up their own backsides, that they can see daylight, but first the facts.
I did something that nobody else thought of doing (probably because they don't know how) and that is a direct comparison when I lower the performance of my 9950X to match the maximum performance of my 7950X in CineBench R23.
The way I do the test is to first run CineBench in a standard configuration with no monitoring software running, so that I get a clean result. After that, I do another 10 min run and then screenshot the monitoring software (in my case Ryzen Master) when the CPU has reached its maximum temp and power draw.
Of course, I am running on Windows 10 and not WinTel 11.
As far as cooling is concerned, I use an Arctic Liquid Freezer III 360 with three Phanteks T30 fans, and the paste I use is Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut Extreme. My ambient room temp is around 30 degrees Celsius because I have had two spine operations and have spinal arthritis.
My motherboard is just a bog-standard X670 Gigabyte AORUS Elite AX. I don't need an expensive X670E to get the best out of my CPU.
First off, here is the maximum result I achieved with my 7950X at the maximum safe voltage for TSMC 5 nm which is 1.2 Volts running CineBench R23 for 10 minutes - FYI this result is after having run my 7950X for about 20 months 24/7 only rebooting for driver updates, hardware upgrades or when the OS plaque, as I like to call it, started making itself noticeable (thanks Micro$haft):
The result is not the highest I can get from my 7950X, the thing is though, I benchmark to configure, I don’t configure to benchmark, so this is running my 24/7 safe clocks and voltages.
Here are the stats for that run after my system had reached homeostasis. My system was running at the maximum safe set voltage of 1.2 Volts - what you see under “CPU Telemetry Voltage” is the get voltage (after the voltage droop for all core workloads):
“Not bad”, you might be thinking. My results are a damned sight better than anything that anyone in the Tech Media/YouTube can achieve on a 10-minute run without resorting to exotic cooling (like chilling or LN2).
Now we get to the closest I could achieve to the same CineBench R23 score I got as a maximum for my 7950X result above after a 10-minute run with my 9950X.
Here are the stats for that run after the system had reached homeostasis. My system was running at a voltage of 0.97 Volts Set (and I have been running it 24/7 like this for a few days now, chucking various loads at it without any problems).
To get the same result as my 7950X with a 360 rad AIO cooler, I could use a cheap, but good, $20 air cooler with my 9950X and still come out ahead on temp.
I am getting the same result with my 9950X as I did with my 7950X with 65% less CPU power draw.
To put this into perspective, if Intel came out with a flagship CPU that could achieve the same performance as the previous generation flagship with 65% less power, then reviewers would be masturbating themselves into a coma.
