AMD's Ryzen 9 5900 spotted on UserBenchmark, only ~5% slower than the more power-hungry 5900X
It is still unclear why AMD chooses to restrict sales of certain CPUs only through OEMs. Most notable recent examples are the non-X Ryzen 9 5900 and Ryzen 7 5800 that are now starting to make an appearance in select premium pre-built gaming rigs. Apparently, AMD is lowering the TDP on these non-X versions just to allow OEMs to include cheaper worse-performing coolers. There is still a good chance we could find these versions available at certain online retailers later on, since the Ryzen 4000 desktop APUs that were also supposed to be OEM-only have been consistently selling at big online retailers for some time. In case you were wondering how the 12-core non-X Ryzen 9 5900 processor is faring against the more power-hungry 5900X version, Tum_Apisak recently discovered an entry in the UserBenchmark database, which shows that the difference is not at all too big, despite the 61.5% higher TDP on the X model.
Now, UserBenchmark is hardly held in high regard by most serious reviewers, but that is the only source, for now. Also, note that the 5900X model has more than 30,000 benchmark entries, while the non-X version only has 2 entries, one of which comes from an Alienware Aurora Ryzen Edition. As far as effective speed differences are concerned, UserBenchmark is reporting that the 5900X is 1% faster, while the non-X versions appears to be 3% slower in the average score category, and 7% slower in the overclocked score category. That said, the non-X model is still a smidge faster in 4-core loads and shaves off a few ns for the RAM latency.
We were expecting to see a greater gap for single-core loads, due to the non-X model having a 700 MHz lower base clock, but this does not seem to influence scores that much, at least for the UserBenchmark suite. Boost clock is only 100 MHz lower, so that pretty much guarantees the multi-core performance is essentially the same on both models. If other benchmark suites prove that the performance difference is indeed that low, retailers selling tray versions of the non-X processors may not even bother to apply any discounts, especially now that the chip shortages are in full effect.