AMD 7900X Retested – PBO, SMT & Overclocked

Last week, we brought you a review of the Ryzen 7 9700X, the latest release in a seemingly long line of rather boring new CPU launches that offer minor upgrades to existing products. In short, it’s fair to say we weren’t particularly impressed by the small increase in performance it offered over a range of benchmarks, but more so with the gaming performance.

We went back and retested with PBO, as we were called out for not enabling it. However, since PBO also works on the CPUs it replaced, the performance gap remained basically the same. So, here we are again, trying to milk the views, I mean, find the performance that we all feel should be there. Surely there’s some magic bullet in the settings that will make the 9700X shine brighter and make the upgrade worth it!? Well according to a recent feature on TechPowerUp, the secret lies in disabling SMT so we thought we’d go about testing it for ourselves.

Historically SMT being disabled has improved gaming performance in some games and decreased it in others, so that’s what we’re going to try today.

Simultaneous multithreading, or SMT, is a process that allows a CPU core to operate multiple jobs at once, and while this does have performance benefits for most cases, disabling it is sort of like forcing the CPU to focus more specifically on a given task. But are users expected to enable SMT for productivity then disable it when they want to game, then put it back on when they’re done? That’s a bit of a clunky process, and one that requires a system reboot too, so it’s not likely they will.

We’re also under no illusion that the 9700X has a lower TDP so it’s not all about performance, but we are, so we want to try and get the most out of it. We’ve also re-tested with PBO set to max limits, and the same but with SMT disabled too to give a much broader spectrum of results. Honestly, if the performance isn’t here, it isn’t anywhere, and we’re not going to shine coal into a diamond with any more convoluted BIOS settings though I am currently working on a 5.3GHz all core overclock, so maybe I’ll make some content on that soon. With all that in mind though, let’s get to the benchmarks, as I’m sure you’re eager to see the results!