Was I Wrong? – AMD Ryzen 9700X Re-Review!

Going One Step Further

So I’ll admit, that was painful to talk about. The synthetics actually saw some differences, but gaming for the most part, didn’t and that’s always clear to see when we look at the average FPS across all of the games, and the cost per frame. It’s here where the 9700X increased in performance by a staggering 1% or 2 frames per second, so nothing of importance, though it did decrease the cost per frame by 2 cents, so silver linings I guess, though it still sees higher than the 5800X3D which does give lower performance, but a better cost per frame.

In the interest of fairness, the 7700X did see an increase in performance too of a slightly stronger but still pitiful 2%, though again, this puts the cost per frame in a better position, but is still pushed out by the cheaper 7600X at $1.35 per frame, which is 27% cheaper per frame and we’ve not enabled PBO there, so that will go down by at least 2 cents if we were to do that.

All jokes aside. I wanted to make this to show that PBO wouldn’t make much of a difference if any, especially as I saw a lot of comments referring to how we didn’t test it, but on that argument, I also wanted to take it one step further, because we’re professionals here, or at least I like to think we are, and testing auto PBO is one step but setting manual max limits is another, so we maxed out the PPT, TDC and EDC limits to the maximum that the motherboard would allow. It’s here where we ran some of the titles again to see how, if anything changes.

It’s in Cyberpunk where we did see another 5% increase over the auto PBO result on the 9700X which now puts it 7% ahead of the stock 9700X result so some gains to be had, but again, nothing spectacular, and at a sacrifice of more heat and more power being used.

In Hogwarts, we originally saw a 2% increase turning PBO on, and then manually setting the limits, we saw another 1% increase, so take from that what you will, but it hardly seems worth it for what you’d get out of it.

Spider-Man originally only saw a small increase in performance enabling PBO on the 9700X, while manually setting the limits saw that performance drop back down, with performance now coming in lower than the default performance of the chip with no PBO enabled.

In Ratchet & Clank, manually setting PBO sees very similar performance to auto PBO and no PBO so enable it, disable it, configure it, in this game, you’re going to see no difference whatsoever as the trend continues.

Lastly, in Starfield, manual PBO beats the default setting of the 9700X by a margin of error 1 FPS, and performs lower than auto PBO, so again, just proving that PBO really isn’t worth it in games at least on this chip.