Take the power back
WE LOVE a confusing set of numbers here at MaximumPC, and oh boy, do we have some below. Performance across the board for our build was generally pretty good—the main highlights were Total War:ThreeKingdoms finally reaching above that 60 fps mark, and MetroExodus rolling across the finish line with a smooth average frame rate of 54 fps. Jump over to the synthetic CPU-oriented benchmarks, however, and they tell a very different story. That single core performance in particular is quite the shocker, at 1,801. We did a few extra runs to be sure, and even double-checked everything, from the CPU cooler to memory settings being enabled correctly, and nope, that’s the best out of all four runs we committed to.
Why so low then, compared to the 7600X? Well, we can only chalk it up to either something being askew with the BIOS compared to the Gigabyte board, or more likely a result of the significantly lower clock-speed and increased 3D V-Cache on the 7800X3D. The 7600X in our zero-point actually has a maximum boost clock that reaches up to 5.3 GHz, while the 7800X3D tops out at 5.0 GHz. This doesn’t sound like much, but over a 10-minute Cinebench run, those numbers add up quickly, leading to such a massive delta there. Unsurprisingly however, given the 7800X3D has two more physical cores and four more threads than the 7600X, it does claw back a win in the Multi-core scenario, beating it by a healthy margin of 24 percent here, too.
It’s neck and neck for the two SSDs here as well, with both the Kingston Fury Renegade and Crucial T500 being neck and neck with one another, at 0 percent and 1 percent respectively. That’s really quite impressive—in separate SSD specific testing, we’ve seen these two drives end up tied with one another in a number of scenarios, too. The T500 tends to have a slight edge in random 4K at Q32, while the Renegade wins out at Q1 by a healthy margin, too. In-game load times are tight between them, but the Renegade generally tends to wipe the floor with the T500 when it comes to file copy times.
SSD shenanigans aside, the core pricing is the real doozie, with a jump up between the two systems being quite surprising—our build today clocks in at $1,814 for the core components versus last month’s $1,368. The price difference between the GPUs, particularly the AIB cards, is fairly substantial at this point, which is a shame. It seems that most of the Supers are now out of stock, or about to be, and prices are skyrocketing because of it. So much for the great deals and sub-$1,000 RTX 4080.
Nonetheless, our Flowy build still hits the mark when it comes to both 4K gaming and rendering prowess. For the time being, Intel does still seem to have the edge with its 14th generation chips, but it’s worth considering that those chips in particular are drawing close to 50 percent more power than their Ryzen contemporaries, and crank up to 100 C to do that.