New to this forum long time reader / follower of website and PC enthusiast, I've built approximately 300 PC's in the last 45 years. I've occasionally ran into all kinds of weird hardware interactions when building a new platform.
As it pertains to this topic, a month ago built a new system with Zen4 Ryzen 9 7950X CPU / ASUS Crosshair X670E motherboard / G Skill DDR5 6000 EXPO 32GB Ram / Power Color Red Devil 6950XT GPU / WD SN850X 4TB NVME storage. I have not had any real issues until I started playing around with Ryzen Master Software on this build. As noted in the article when you select primary purpose for GAMING it does disable one CCD showing only 8 cores, however after a few reboots I pulled up hardware monitor and it reflected only 4 cores 0 through 3 in CPUID HW Monitor. Nothing I did would retore it back higher than 8 cores switching to Content Creation in the Ryzen Master program. You could definitely tell the system felt anemic when in 4 core mode.
To correct the issue I had to uninstall Ryzen Master, clean my registry, reset my BIOS setting twice, and upon the 4th reboot finally got all 16 cores to display in CPUID HW Monitor. I was running the newest version of Ryzen Master, and have since reinstalled it leaving it on Content Creation with both CCD's enabled. I feel I have a very decent CPU in the silicon lottery as when setting it up for EXPO profile and PBO for overclocking through Ryzen Master I regularly am getting peaks of 6.3GHZ on 12 of my 16 cores with a high temp of 84c as reflected by HW monitor, My cooling is a Cooler Master ML360 ARGB AIO with Thermal Grizzley Kryonaut TIM.
Now if I run CPU stress tests synthetic benchmarks etc. it hits 95c quickly and rarely hits 6GHz on any core. Definitely a difference in synthetic benchmark performance and real world application use
Anyway I thought that Ryzen Master dropping my CPU to 4 cores was worth noting in case others were having significant performance impacts after setting it to Gaming mode, they too might be getting one CCD disable first, then half the cores on the one CCD disabled on subsequent reboot like I experienced.
Worth keeping an eye on.