We don’t do a ton of Mac testing, so that probably isn’t something we will be doing directly. We do make our benchmarks available for anyone to download and use, however, so I’m sure you will find some results from reviewers that focus on Mac that you can directly compare. You can also search through our public benchmark database to find whatever system you want: https://www.pugetsystems.com/benchmarks/

Likely not very much of a difference for V-Ray and Ae. We are waiting for higher speed JDEC RAM to come out before doing too much performance testing, but we saw almost no difference with DDR4 RAM speeds, so we don’t expect there to be much with different DDR5 as long as you don’t go too far in either direction.

Thanks for the awesome data for content professionals. What performance differential would you expect when running 128GB RAM and having to drop to the lower speed with current DDR5 options? Particularly interested in V-Ray and After Effects performance.

We are going to start being clearer about this in our articles, but the big thing to know about our testing is that it is all done with a focus on what you would use in a workstation. That means doing things like turning off auto-overclocking that most high-end motherboards come with by default, and sticking to manufacturer specifications for what RAM to use. For Ryzen 7000, that is 5200MHz if you are using two sticks, or technically just 3600MHz if using four sticks. In addition to that, we only use RAM that fully JDEC compliant, and unfortunately, DDR5 is really lagging behind right now with the fastest JDEC sticks still at 4800MHz.

It is really just a difference in what question we are trying to answer. Most hardware reviewers are testing for hardware enthusiasts who will be using overclocked RAM, keeping things like MCE or PBO enabled, have beefy AIO coolers, and things like that. We, on the other hand, are testing for how the hardware would perform in a workstation where stability and reliability takes precedence over getting the extra bit of performance. Neither is wrong by any stretch, just slightly different goals.

Pretty much everything we test is largely unaffected by RAM speed unless you get to the extremes. We typically stick with what is officially supported by the CPU, but it is getting tough since pretty much all consumer CPUs change what that is depending on the number of sticks you use and whether they are dual rank.

The other thing that is going to affect us for a bit is that we want to only use JDEC RAM in our systems, and that is lagging behind. 4800MHz is the fastest JDEC DDR5 RAM we can get right now, so that what we have to stick with until we can get faster. This is another area where our testing diverges quite a bit from a lot of other reviewers. Most of them are focused on peak performance (liquid cooling to lessen throttling, high speed RAM, etc), whereas we focus on what we would be comfortable selling in our workstations. Neither is wrong by any means, just answering different questions.

A spokesperson for AMD has indicated that 95°C is normal for the 7950 (and 7900?) and those processors are designed to run at that temp all day, every day.