Gamers Nexus is testing the 7960X and 7980XE with focus on power and thermals, with interesting comparisons to Threadripper - both stock, overclocked & delidded. Since that's been an argument here lately, I advise you to check these charts - I find them very interesting. Stock numbers in particular are quite low.
Written article here (with more charts):
https://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/3066-intel-i9-7980xe-7960x-thermals-power-review
TL;DR: really big power numbers when overclocking, and way too hot, with great performance. Not a surprise.
I found this interesting from that article, in their words:
"For our standardized Blender test, we were measuring power consumption of 218W with the i9-7960X 16C/32T CPU at stock settings, or 492W when overclocked to 4.6GHz with a 1.22VID. That’s 40A down the EPS12V cables, at that point. We measured about 214W for the stock 7980XE – within usual variance of the 7960X – and also measured nearly 500W with the 4.5GHz overclock. Now, of course, how worthwhile this tradeoff is depends heavily on the actual performance improvement – we’ll get to that next.
Comparatively, the AMD Threadripper 1950X CPU consumed about 144W in the same test. We saw the 1920X plot around the same, with a 145W throughput. Overclocking the 1950X landed it at 274W, though we only ever achieved a 4.0GHz overclock in initial testing, so it wasn’t really worthwhile."
Granted the times were 14.4 for the 7960X@218 watts vs 13.3@144 watts for the 1950X, so it got beat, but at what a cost for power ? And overclocked 7980XE@500 watts !!!!
And again, the 1950X@ 4 ghz they took 1.44 vcore ? how come nobody else needs that much ?
I call BS again from personal knowledge.