[adrian_b]

There have been a lot of comments on many Internet forums, during the last months, based on various benchmarks of engineering samples, that the gaming performance of these new models will be only marginally better than of the existing Zen 4 models and some times even lower than of those with 3D cache.

Only when the models of Zen 5 with big 3D cache will be launched it is expected that they will be noticeably faster for gaming.

When a 5.5 GHz 9700X matches or exceeds in single thread performance a 6.0 GHz 14900K, that is an almost 10% over the older competition and it certainly is 13%-18% over the corresponding model of the same clock frequency from AMD's previous generation.

There are many professional applications where the AVX-512 performance is decisive. There would have been much more, had Intel not prevented this by their market segmentation policies, which force most software developers to support only the weakest and most obsolete CPUs. I am myself interested in certain CAD/EDA engineering applications, where I expect a good speed-up from a 9950X, at a much lower price than for any previous solutions. This is a nice change at a time when most computing solutions increase in price, instead of decreasing, like in the old days.

[effie]

> There have been a lot of comments on many Internet forums

Still, the non-improvement in default setting surprised people, e.g. see the embarrasing confession by PCWorld, they did not believe the performance increase is so minuscule and asked AMD if that is for real.

> it certainly is 13%-18% over the corresponding model of the same clock frequency from AMD's previous generation.

More like 10%. And you have to overclock for that. Overclocking has become a fool's errand, you can expect it to cause problems, crashes, etc. Granted, if crashes are rare, gamers may go for it.