Another review showing results towards the higher side:
https://www.techradar.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-7-2700x
The thing is, unusually slow results on a platform can be caused by a number of things. Higher results on the other hand, provided they're correct and not due to e.g. a timing issue, well it's hard to misinterpret them*, provided of course they've done a couple of runs and not ended up with any bizarre results due to benchmark errors and whatnot. For these tests however, the performance seems consistent across a range of applications so I'm struggling to see where an error could lie. If it's platform-dependent then perhaps some sort of multicore enhancement or whatever the board MFR calls it is ending up enabled, but that's not reflected in AAT's power draw figures which are within TDP (TR seem to be measuring wall power?)
As for the 8700k's power draw I suspect AAT are using some sort of AVX load which is causing high power draw, and TechRadar using something like an integer load - particularly on modern CPUs, what the 'load' is can have a significant impact on core power draw.
*Take download speed as an example. You've just bought a new phone and are trying out the LTE connection - you download a 100MB file in 10 seconds. Clearly, at that time the connection was transferring around 80Mb/s (on average) because you have the finished file stored on your phone at the end of it - the connection is clearly capable of doing so or that would have been impossible. Perhaps it varied during the download but that means it must have been capable of going above 80Mb/s as much as it went under as you measured an average. You just know the connection is capable of
at least 80Mb/s. Other people getting 40Mb/s doesn't invalidate your result... because it happened.
Similarly if I transcode a video file on a computer and it's finished in 10 minutes (measured accurately), and the output is identical to the control, then that happened. Bugs generally don't make things faster!
I'm not dismissing the possibility of measurement discrepancies, but people criticising AAT for 'not setting it up properly' - well it would be nice if they explained
how? Again, lower results could be down to HDD activity, buggy drivers, antivirus running in the background. These things all make performance go
down, not up.