> The chip is not designed for this rate of power dissipation
Says who? AMD advertises the chip as having a base clock of 4.3 GHz over all cores. The 9950X pulls somewhere around 220W at 5ghz all cores and with how power scales, 170W at the advertised 4.3 GHz seems more than plausible. Seems perfectly within reason that the advertised frequency and the advertised TDP are aligned.
I wish Anandtech was still around as iirc they did have charts for all this, which nobody else seems to do :/
> and it is not the rate of power dissipation that you can expect to get from the chip.
Again, says who? Who's expectations? This is a consumer chip, and the expectations of a consumer chip is not that it spends 100% of its time running prime95 or a similar "power virus" workload. I expect that if I buy this chip while I would have intervals of >170W, I'd also have long periods of much less than 170W. If I have a cooler designed to sustain 170W of cooling, that's going to work out on average just fine as there's thermal mass in the system.
The chip is not designed for this rate of power dissipation; and it is not the rate of power dissipation that you can expect to get from the chip.