Ryzen 7000 has better performance per watt though. If you don't want a space heater you might be better served to get a Ryzen 7000 and limit the TDP to whatever you're comfortable with.

It'll be faster than a Ryzen 5000 drawing the same amount of power: according to AMD the Ryzen 7000 will be "up to 49 percent"[1] faster at the same power draw.

[1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/918007/amd-launches-ryzen-70...

Precisely which reviews have you seen for Ryzen 7000 that paint it as a space heater?

The official announcement indicated significantly better power efficiency. AMD claims that if you limit both to a 65W TDP, you'll see 74% better performance on the new generation, but that even at full TDP, the efficiency will be higher.

However, I am waiting on the actual reviews... not making multi-year decisions based off of limited, pre-release information. If it is more efficient, then vowing to stick with an older, less efficient product just because it has a lower TDP number on the box doesn't make any sense. Efficiency is the only thing that matters when seeking to avoid a space heater, since the less efficient product will generate more heat for a given amount of work. All of these processors will clock down when idle

Not the person you asked but I poked around to see what I could find. Seems like a bunch of random sites all taking about some leaker. I could find nothing concrete to support them running hot.

https://www.google.com/search?q=ryzen+7000+running+hot&rlz=1...

That’s a lot of articles claiming the processors will “run” at 95C, but… what is that even supposed to mean? The processor temperature depends entirely on the cooling solution being used. Those leaks don’t seem to be very grounded in reality. Maybe they meant the junction temperature or the automatic throttling temperature, but those certainly weren’t the implication.

But, all of this is still irrelevant to efficiency. Running at 230W for 1 second to complete a task would generate less heat / use less electricity than running at 150W for 2 seconds to complete the same task.

Psychologically it's going to be hard for most people to underclock something they spent hundreds of dollars on.

Underclocking isn’t necessary for it to be more efficient, if AMD is to be believed. A higher peak power does not mean generating more heat / using more electricity to perform a given task, as long as the task can be completed proportionally faster.

But, efficiency is often a curve, and you can supposedly get crazy efficiency by limiting the TDP of Ryzen 7000, so it is an option for those who prize efficiency above maximum performance, and it would still represent an improvement over a Ryzen 5000 at the same TDP. As I said, though, we’ll need to see actual reviews.