AMD 7900X Retested – PBO, SMT & Overclocked

Starting things off with 3DMark Timespy and disabling SMT has quite a detrimental effect to the tune of 12%. Enabling PBO on max limits does push performance back up by 2% but for the best performance, at least in this test, we’d advise to just straight up enable PBO with no other changes.

Moving onto Blender and it’s a similar story, though expected, that the 9700X performs worse with SMT off as it sees a hit of 26% and enabling PBO on max limits further drops performance by 9% so again, the best you can expect with the 9700X is to straight up enable PBO and not touch anything else beyond going further with a curve optimiser that could net some further but still small gains.

In Corona, it’s the same again. This time we see a 55% increase in render time by disabling SMT and PBO Max along with SMT disabled sees things drop another 12%. If you hadn’t noticed the trend so far, the 9700X with PBO is the best outcome at 66 seconds to render, but SMT could help more in terms of games that we’ll look at shortly.

In V-Ray, we see another large drop in performance with 29% less Vsamples compared to the stock 9700X result and combining SMT disabled with PBO on max limits, that drops by 6% while PBO gives our best result at 17986, which is very similar to PBO on max limits, and a nice uplift from the stock score of 15539.

Cinebench originally came in with a multi-core score of 19804 and PBO and PBO max saw this increase and with SMT disabled, as we’re talking multi-core, that score dropped by 24% , though on this occasion, PBO at max limits did see it recover, but only by 5%. The single-core score didn’t move much with just a margin of error 1% between the stock result and SMT result, but the best balance of multi-core and single-core scores come in when PBO was set to its max limits.

Our last synthetic benchmark is Geekbench and here, again we see huge drops in performance in terms of the multi-threaded score with the 9700X with PBO enabled coming in with the best performance, while SMT drops performance at quite a hefty level, though single threaded performance again, stays within the same range as the PBO score, but native stock settings again seem to be the best for single-thread performance.