At first I thought that (given it's AMD running the test) they'd hamstring the Intel CPU with an under powered cooler, but it looks like they gave it a big Corsair H100i 240mm water cooler. If that's not enough for a 140W CPU, I don't know what is - it was probably on turbo the entire time. They gave their own CPUs an "EK Prototype SP3" cooler, though - is this it? https://www.ekwb.com/shop/ek-kit-s360
Regardless, the message seems to be that if you want top performance, get a big cooler.
The use of my desktop is maybe 5% gaming, the rest is software dev and browsing, isn't there still a reason to prefer an IPC advantage for compilers and other system tasks?
I mentioned this, because I don't think a 12 core CPU would really give me that much more productivity or value gain than an i7 7700 or Ryzen 1700.
I only really need a single linux compatible nVidia GPU, enough cores and ram to comfortably handle 20 browser tabs, an IDE and a relatively hefty docker dev flow.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd-ryzen...
For me it's still unclear how much of a real advantage IPC provides for common tasks or non-parallel process a developer might be running.
If you run one non-parallel task, the 7700K will be faster. If you run many non-parallel tasks in… parallel (make -j16), the 1700 will be seriously faster.