Release-day microcode did improve performance by 4-7% and was enough to place the 11700K consistently above the 10700K and have it trade blows with the 5800X. Also such a comment is quite rich coming from AMD fanboys that would definitely cause an uproar there have been rogue pre-release reviews with pre-release microcode that put AMD cpus in a bad light. Let’s not forget that these are the same fanboys who over the years have complained about pretty much everything that did not put AMD in the best possible light like:
- not retesting AMD cpus with the latest and greatest BIOS (even 2-6 months AFTER release)
- not testing with high speed or low latency RAM
- not using certain type of RAM (Samsung B die)
- not OCing the infinity fabric
- not using the “right” mode of Windows (remember creator mode vs game mode in Threadripper?)
- not using the latest version of Adobe
- testing gaming with older titles and not only the latest titles that take advantage of more cores
- testing gaming only at 1080p and not also at 4K
- not testing streaming scenarios
- not tinkering with Matlab to set an environmental variable for the fast codepath
- not using a community-created scheduler for Threadripper
- hating certain software because of supposedly being poorly optimised and not leveraging more cores/threads while knowing nothing about Amdahl's law.
And now the same fanboys see a conspiracy theory of Intel and Microsoft instead of sheer incompetence on behalf of their beloved AMD to collaborate with Microsoft and iron out the bugs ahead of Windows 11 release. The fact of the matter is that the 12900K is faster than the 5950X in gaming while costing $210 less. It also beats it in single, light and mid-threaded productivity workloads and trades blows with it in heavily multithreaded ones. It is also available on a superior platform with the latest generation of PCIe express (PCIe gen 5), latest RAM generation (DDR5), has superior cpu-chipset bandwidth (with a DMI4 x8 link), superior chipset features, support for Thunderbolt 4, WiFi 6E and the list goes on.