I can get 2 second variation just by clicking the corona benchmark run after run. The benchmark itself starts bit dubiously, then it could be the initial turbo clocks which are often maintained bit higher just for 5-10 seconds.
The Rays/Second is really much better metric.
I've never found personally all those discrepancies in performance caused by 2990WX, but it's true I never compared it a lot, 2990WX is Veronika's PC not mine. Maybe I should look closer at this but I plan to renegate it to render-farm.
I personally find 3970X great as package due to both having great single-core performance now while still increasing multi-core. So there is no compromise being done now compared to 2990WX.
But if you have 2990WX, I wouldn't necessarily upgrade to this, I would go one step at least higher to make it worth the money the whole platform costs, if there is 48core. If not, then the 64.
Re: Prices of TRX40 boards, the new "mid-range" lol, 500 +/- Euros, seems to only have good enough VRM for the 32-core version, while the mammoth Zenith II/MSI Creator/Aorus Extreme, 800-1000 Euro beefed up enough to run even the 64 core.
I really don't find this market segmentation sympathetic from board brands, 500 Euros gave us 19 phases last year, it can't give it to us now suddenly?
Esp. Gigabyte created fantastic TRX40 and X570 boards only at the very top, and imho intentionally made all the rest worse. At least Asus "mid-range" is good enough.