AMD 7900X Retested – PBO, SMT & Overclocked

Going One Step Further

So looking at individual data, let’s break it down into two sections. The first being synthetics, which in anything that utilises multi-threaded utilization, SMT being disabled showed some really big dips in performance, but nothing beyond what’s expected when you’re literally telling the CPU to stop utilising its ability to run multiple threads per core and will instead only run a single thread per core, so with the 9700X which has 8 cores and 16 threads, the machine now sees it as only having 8 threads.

In gaming though, where most games are geared towards a smaller number of cores of threads, you’d expect, depending on the game to see an uplift in performance, if its able to put more focus on the relevant cores, and sadly, when it comes to performance, we’ve seen some good and some bad, but when you average it out, the impact is actually pretty underwhelming. The AMD Ryzen 9700X managed an average FPS of 160, which is just 7 FPS above the performance of the 7700X, so not exactly a huge leap, but that’s just the base performance.

When we enabled PBO, the 9700X increased its performance to 162, again, a very small improvement of just 2 FPS, and not really much to talk about there. So we tried it with SMT turned off, and that saw the performance increase to….163, again, that’s pretty much within a margin for error, and nothing you would really notice in real world usage.

What’s even more surprising is that with SMT off and PBO set to max, the performance is back at the original 160 FPS average. That’s right, turning on all of the performance boosting technologies gave us the square root of nothing when we average out the gaming performance and due to that the cost per frame does move around, but we’re talking a cent or two here and there kind of making this whole experiment mathematically pointless, unless you play Spider-Man and want that big gain, because that really is the main game, I guess along with Remnant II that saw some fairly healthy uplifts. Sadly, games like Starfield brought that back down, hence the results being so close.

SMT gave with one hand, and took away with the other.

The big stark result on this chart though, is the 7800X3D which is just sitting there obnoxiously faster than everything else, and did that require a lot of extra trickery to get the performance to work? Nope.