> It's a flop for people who expect that after 20months, they'll get 13%-18% more.
If you have unrealistic expectations, everything, everywhere is always going to be a flop.
You're not getting 18% more IPC at 30% energy savings in a single generation. That kind of uplift hasn't been seen probably since Pentium 3 vs Pentium 4 era, or maybe Nehalem vs Core Duo.
Regardless, if you run the Zen 5 CPUs at the same TDPs as the 7000 series, you can still easily get 15-20% uplift. It's just that AMD has chosen conservative defaults for energy efficiency.
And purely for gaming, you should be waiting for X3D versions.
Gamer/enthusiast segment expects performance increase, not energy savings. CPU consumption is not even the greatest power hog in gaming PC.
Zen 3 brought 20% more performance at much better power consumption than Zen 2, and this set expectations. Zen 4 was a weaker improvement, and some people hoped that was one time thing, and maybe Zen 5 will get back to Zen 3 level improvements or better. But the improvement is even worse this time.
That's why in this consumer segment, 9700X is like Intel 11gen, a token increase in performance (and sometimes, decrease) as compared to previous gen, and thus a meh product. In other segments, like in desktops for work, or laptops, focus is different, and the same performance at lower consumption is a great new feature. So it's not all bad - it's just meh for gamers and enthusiasts.
Yes, you can overclock, and expect to either win the lottery, or maybe get problems like Intel has. If AMD did not clock these higher by default, there is a good reason for that, and it is not because of green political reasons. AMD has every incentive to clock as high as possible, to look and sell better. Most probably, the current batches of 4nm chips out of TSMC aren't rock-solid at higher clocks.
Re X3D, yes those should be better. But this is marketed as 9700X, not as 9700, so it's a flop. PCWorld was so surprised by the non-improvement that they postponed their review and checked with AMD if their poor bench results really are what AMD intended them to see.
If you have unrealistic expectations, everything, everywhere is always going to be a flop.
You're not getting 18% more IPC at 30% energy savings in a single generation. That kind of uplift hasn't been seen probably since Pentium 3 vs Pentium 4 era, or maybe Nehalem vs Core Duo.
Regardless, if you run the Zen 5 CPUs at the same TDPs as the 7000 series, you can still easily get 15-20% uplift. It's just that AMD has chosen conservative defaults for energy efficiency.
And purely for gaming, you should be waiting for X3D versions.