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

So starting things off with 3DMark Timespy and by enabling PBO on the 9700X, we do see an uplift of just over 1%, so not really anything in it, though this does now put it 3% faster than the original 7700X results, though in the interest of fairness, enabling PBO on the 7700X made little to no difference, so the 9700X now sits 2% ahead of the 7700X both with PBO enabled, which is essentially the same difference that we saw in the pre-PBO results.

Blender actually sees quite a dramatic difference when enabling PBO on the 9700X to the tune of 13%. This now puts the 9700X ahead of the 7700X stock result by a pretty stark 16% and enabling PBO on the 7700X actually saw the performance drop from 66 samples per minute to 65 samples per minute which equates to less than 1% so you could argue the performance on the 7700X with and without PBO as being identical. This could be for a variety of reasons including power and temperature limits being hit and therefore throttling.

Corona is another example where the 7700X has no advantage to enabling PBO, while the 9700X due to its lower power limit and therefore lower temperatures sees a healthy 6% decrease in render time from its default settings. This now also increases the margin between the two CPUs from the 9700X being 2 seconds faster than the 7700X, now to 7 seconds faster.

V-Ray again doesn’t see a huge amount of movement on the 7700X, with PBO giving us just under 2% extra performance and bridging the gap between it and the 9700X a little more, though the 9700X manages to see a 16% increase in performance with PBO enabled which now sits at 17986 putting it 22% ahead of the 7700X PBO result and 24% ahead of the non-PBO result so some pretty impressive stuff.

Booting up Cinebench and again we see a decent uplift in performance but only in multi-core performance where the 9700X manages to push out a 10% better score compared to its non PBO result. Sadly the single core performance does suffer somewhat, but only by less than 1% so neither here nor there. Again, with the 7700X we actually see a drop in performance on both single and multi-core performance by around 0.6% on multi-core showing that AMD focussing on energy efficiency may have been the right move as the Zen 4 CPU is definitely hitting some limits.

In Geekbench, again, we do see an uplift of 9% in our multi-threaded score on the 9700X while the 7700X only saw a less than 1% increase by enabling the technology. What this means for the margin between the two CPUs which was only at 3%, is now with PBO vs PBO is that the margin is increased to a little over 11%. Now if only AMD could have this enabled as default out of the box, then the launch day reviews may have showed a very different picture.

Moving onto our last synthetic benchmark test the results sadly fall much closer with the 9700X only giving us 1% extra performance with PBO enabled compared to the default score which again does further the gap between itself and the 7700X with PBO set to auto but then enabling PBO on the 7700X saw an uplift of 0.7% so we’re just moving the goal posts and not seeing the margin move between the two processors, and this test is likely the closest thing we have at least on the synthetic test as to how gameplay may be.