[Aurornis]

> so, to test, one of us took a heavily PBO'd 9700X and changed /proc/cpuinfo to be a "9700X3D" and ran a Passmark run to see if the software would be fooled...

The two articles I saw about this both emphasized that the high clock speed (from the PBO) was inconsistent with the name of the CPU that implied it would be lower performance than the 9800X3D.

Most of the sites I check regularly have been pretty good about calling out inconsistent leaks or rumors, contrary to the “all journalism is trash” comments down below. On the other hand, if you were following someone who presented this singular benchmark result as proof of something without looking at the details, it might be a good time to reconsider the quality of your sources. I did see some lazy Twitter personalities parroting the result without any actual thought.

[hnuser123456]

This is all extra confusing (as to why people republished this) because a 9850X3D was already rumored a couple weeks ago as a higher binned 9800X3D, which would actually make sense, as well as a 9950X3D2 with dual X3D CCDs.

[0xf7ff]

Yeah, we completely forgot that Arae's 9700X had been PBO'ed. If you look at the Passmark bench (or screenshots, now that it's been taken down) you'll see that 5.8GHz is the *only* clock speed listed, it doesn't even state what the base clock is.

An Intel engineer in the comments did confirm that they test some CPUs to destruction in the factory (at Intel, at least), but "...if the benchmarks leave the lab, the employee leaves the company". Also that they usually do that kind of testing on golden bin chips, not a lower-clocked bin.