I consider "Eco-Mode" to be the true default mode. AMD set the default to max OC because that's what Intel did to try to make their CPUs look better than they really are in review benchmarks. If AMD hadn't done it, their CPUs would appear far slower than Intel's even though that's just not the case. It's getting ridiculous these days.
100%, for gamers eco mode is where to be. For tweakers, you then find a way to undervolt and get as much performance as possible in that eco range.
Thanks for the suggestion, but with custom water cooling, reducing TDP sounds counter-intuitive to my goals of achieving higher performance. I just meant to point out that the Prime sieve algorithm in PerfTest 10.2 is an anomaly in terms of pushing temperatures.
Theres a reason my 5800x3D is 4% faster than techpowerups review system while running colder (i've got a 3090 pre-heating my coolant. Long term i'd love to put the CPU back on air) using less power and limiting those values is a big part of why.
Logic can be misleading if you're missing information, it's the biggest enemy of beginners.
Horrible, HORRIBLE rushed PS paint image - would you rather the spiky clocks and performance that gets you a win in 'maximum' performance but worse lows, or a flat value above the average of the spiky result?
With modern hardware their boost methods are *Designed* to work within limits. Think of the BIOS limits as a way to cap performance at 95%, where the hardware limits in the CPU/GPU might drop it far lower briefly - on ryzen they call it clock stretching where cores will idle for a few milliseconds (they can change states every single ms) so you could get 1% more peak performance, only to have the CPU forced to sleep 5% of the time harming the overall performance and synthetic testing doesn't always catch this sort of thing as gaming runs all the PC hard at once producing more heat, over long time periods.
77c/121W PPT (107W CPU, rest is from SoC running 64GB of ram)
As an example of how this pays off, screenshots from my playing borderlands 2 in 4k 144Hz (In vulkan)
120FPS cap with +2 frames from the render queue
Perfectly flat frametimes. Zero variation. Nothing every hits any hardware throttles (CPU, GPU, VRMs, etc), so it never downclocks fully.