And they said
"Moore's Law is Dead".

Yet here we have a CPU that slaps around everything from Team Blue, at half the power usage. Chapeau, AMD.
Now let's hope AMD reallocate the smart people to the GPU department to sort out the high power consumption over there.
Just did some power costs calculation, and if you game 3hrs/day you have the 60 bucks back in your pocket within 2 years. And of course lower noise and less heat in your room. Savings will differ if you game more or if your power costs are lower/higher. Just calculate it yourself here:
Energy cost calculator
MSRP at 499€ was expected. The 13700K launched for 539€, the cheapest one you can get now for 444€, roughly 5 months after launch. So prices will go down after the early adopter rush dives.
Do people actually bother trying to run anything above 6000 on Zen 4?
Faster than DDR6000 is only a Intel thing, nothing to gain on AMD here. But I noticed the
CL36 RAM kit you used hasn't the best timings out there. Hardware Unboxed" used a
CL30 kit and got quiet some performance gains:
How To Cripple Zen 4 In Gaming Benchmarks: AMD Zen 4 vs. Intel Raptor Lake Memory Scaling
The AMD reviewer's guide mentions the following under "Known Issues":
Reviewers may encounter low scores when switching directly from the Ryzen™ 9 7950X3D processor to the Ryzen™ 7 7800X3D processor without reinstalling a fresh version of Windows OS. This is likely a result of the AMD PPM provisioning file driver still being applied to the Ryzen™ 7 7800X3D processor, which was not its intended use. This performance issue is not a typical end user scenario and is only a result of switching CPUs without installing a fresh version of Windows OS.
Though it will not affect a lot of customers, it's still a strange behaviour. Would be interesting to know where the driver is stored. Pretty sure there is a way to remove it manually.
Did you try to remove the CPU from the
Windows Device Manager and reboot? Worked for other hardware before for me. Could also be that it's hidden in the
Windows Boot Partition. But even for that there's a solution. Just do a drive backup of your OS drive, reinstall Windows & then restore the Windows partition (without the boot partition!). That's also the way how you can get a working restore on a new drive when the backup software is cancelling out because the drive do not match.
Long boot times (fixed on some motherboards) I've been complaining about extremely long boot times in previous Zen 4 reviews, and they are still unreasonably slow. While some vendors, especially ASRock have made great progress, things on my ASUS board are basically unchanged. They've added a "Memory Context Restore" BIOS option a while ago, which reduces the boot times to acceptable levels. Unfortunately on the newer BIOS versions enabling MCR will result in random blue screens in Windows, especially when the machine is idle. I'm not sure why AMD isn't implementing a universal approach to address this, instead relying on motherboard vendors to cook up their own solutions.
Would love to see a
AMD "Boot Times" Motherboard Roundup review. Let's see who did their homework. Pretty sure if there is a substantial difference in bootup times from board to board it would influence quite some purchasing decisions.
I am really concerned about motherboard pricing and the longevity of the CPU with that hard voltage limit. What's more, there's no room for overclocking (not really an enthusiast part) and it needs tinkering to achieve maximal performance
Is that you,
Ryan Shrout?

No worries, prices for mainboards will come down even more. It's just a matter of time.
And in case you missed the memo,
overclocking is dead since
Thermal Throttling is a thing. It will just boost till it hits max. temps. Same goes for GPU's nowadays.