have 3950x and couldn’t find a game that would utilize more than 25%

Unfortunately most games are largely single threaded - 25% means nothing if single thread bottlenecks. I had 3950x and it was becoming bottleneck above 90-100 fps in cyberpunk 2077. Which is fine in most cases. Just don't bundle it with 5090 because card won't be fully utilized.

I really loved that CPU for ECO mode. 65W, no in game slow down, and ~20% slower in all 16 core workloads. Silent, great for overnight work like mass 4k footage transcoding. IMO best semi professional CPU of its time.

Yeah, it actually is. It's better performancewise than my old 3070Ti (mainly because 8G VRAM nowadays really tanks performance at higher resolutions) but i do not have the necessary cash to upgrade in the current market.

I do a shitton of heavy compression/decompression, which is why i opted for the 16-core one (because this is a really good use case for it, and it is the maximum my mainboard supports either way - that took me flashing my bios, then replace the cpu, and then flash again immediately after to ensure everything worked fine - can't even place the old CPU back in, and no way to downgrade) - if taking the fact into account that this platform is pretty old, it still is in the upper middle part of the pack in gamersnexus benchmarks regarding these operations, and i haven't had any game yet that really was cpu limited outside of how long turns take in strategy games.