You absolutely can reign it back in to sanity, and get better performance per watt over the previous gen, and still be noticeably faster over the previous gen.

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With AMD, apparently we're going to see BIOS updates from board manufacturers to make doing that simple. Set it to a lower power limit in a few keystrokes, still have something blazing fast (faster than previous gen), but use 145W instead of 250W. Or go even lower, still be a bit faster than previous gen while using around 88W on a 7950X instead of the 118W a 5950X did.

Intel -- who has been redlining their CPUs for years now -- even noted Raptor Lake's efficiency at lower power levels. Again, cut power consumption by 40-50%, for only a tiny performance hit. They actually made entire slides for their recent presentation highlighting this!

NVIDIA no different, and has been for years. Ampere stock voltages were well outside their sweet spot. Undervolt, cut power consumption by 20-25% and have performance UNCHANGED.

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Sure, there's more efficient stuff. Take last generation's 8-core Ryzen 7 PRO 5750GE. About 80% of the performance of an Intel Core i5-12600K, but only uses 38W flat out instead of 145W.