The impressive part is that it has IPC on par with Raptor Cove, what’s holding it to Skylake performance is the low max clocks.

It literally has higher IPC than Zen4, which is an impressive showing for Loongson. I’m guessing it’s a very wide design that has to stay at low clocks because it is hampered by the relatively ancient 14nm process it’s manufactured on.

You’ve gotta give credit where credit is due.

It has the same physical memory as the consumer cards, it just allows in-band ECC which is a software solution. There is no additional manufacturing cost to including in-band ECC. Nvidia even enables the option on the 4090.

You’re right that you’re paying for the certifications though.

1. You don’t necessarily need to worry about affinity, but if you want to get X3D performance in every game then yes some sort of affinity software is required. Not all games work with gamebar, even manually adding them to the game detection, and some games that do will still have issues because it turns off the parking if the load on CCD0 gets too high.

I personally use CapframeX for affinity as process lasso causes some games to crash (like BG3).

2. High performance mode disables core parking, which breaks the software. You need to use balanced.

3. The built in AMD solution is only really sufficient if you don’t want to use intensive software while gaming, and it won’t work for all games even then.

4. If you want to be using the extra 8 cores for productivity while gaming, you’ll need to use affinity instead of gamebar. Parked cores run no code, and running multithreaded workloads while gaming will immediately trigger the “disable parking if load is high” rule and allow the game to leave the VCache die which hurts performance. If your workload is gaming plus MT in the background, you will need to use affinity controls 100% of the time.

5. It’s an amazing CPU, I really love it. It is flawed though, the gamebar solution is incredibly half-arsed from AMD. I don’t think they could’ve gone for a lower effort, more fragile method than just “when gamebar says a game is open, turn off half the cores”. I’m fine with manually doing affinity because I honestly enjoy the tinkering, it’s fun to benchmark whether games (and indeed other applications) prefer clocks or cache. When using affinity, it’s the best CPU in the world for mixed gaming/productivity.

6. For your workloads, the 7950X3D makes more sense. It’s a monstrous CPU for MT, and if you get benefit from more MT I wouldn’t settle for the 7800X3D.

One other thing, I’d recommend getting 64GB now if you can afford it. 4 dimm support is atrocious, so if you ever need to upgrade ram you’ll want to instead take out the 32GB and put in 2x32GB. The price jump to 64GB is relatively pretty small.