as for why people dont do it, because personally, I am not competing for a high score on a leaderboard. And it's even less important in 4k and even 2k gaming to a degee.
Its true, most people won't notice a difference between any modern CPU, since most people are going to be GPU bound, since most people use mid-range GPUs and are not gaming at 1080p with a 5090.
I do think people under-estimate overclocking these days though. Arrow Lake can get a double digit improvement in performance in many games from RAM tuning. It does make a difference in some games, even with a mid-range GPU... but still most people probably wouldn't really even notice a 15% improvement. I do it because I'm an enthusiast and do care enough to have top tier gaming CPU performance, and I've had top tier CPU gaming performance since 2024.
just adding more heat, wattage, and stress for barely anything outside of maybe full HD gaming ( which I dont assume people buying these CPUs even game at full HD ).
An overclocked system can use the same, or in some cases even less power than stock.
Its overclocking the P-Cores which will cause you to increase wattage, and I wouldn't recommend doing that since you will not get much performance from overclocking P-Cores.
The things that are worth overclocking on Arrow Lake are DRAM, Ring, D2D and NGU, those things can be overclocked without increasing CPU power...
And yes, the 270k destroys the 9700xt in MT. But then I wouldn't buy either CPU for MT in the first place if this was my goal. We are only talking about gaming here.
If the goal is gaming, they are both similar. I personally wouldn't be buying any 8-Core CPU in 2026 as 12 Core CCD is coming with Zen6, which will make 8-Cores seem like a joke (outside of gaming and perhaps even in some next-gen games).
