Regardless not fun to shoot those rounds, that steel butt plate punishes the shoulder when you bench that rifle. The cheek weld (for me anyway)when you pull the trigger is like, a little devil opens a hatch and punches you right in the cheek. Perhaps this is why this gun is a bit of a safe queen.
Yup, that's why I started loading 8X57 when I owned these things. Military spec PPU 7.92X57 sS was £8 / 100 in the period I'm thinking of, cheaper than you could handload 308 size cartridges in the UK at the time.
My local gun dealer got a large batch of mint surplus Portuguese Mauser-Vergueiro m/1904-39s in and was selling them at a very reasonable price. They were the originally long M1904 6,5X58mmP rifles manufactured by DWM and later shortened to K98 OAL, rebored and rerifled in the late 1930s after Portugal adopted 7.92 and started buying copies of the KAR98k from German manufacturers. A hybrid Mannlicher / Mauser action, this was my favourite 7.92 service rifle by far of the half-dozen long and short models I owned over the years. I wish I still had it in fact.
When I got it, I thought I had one cartridge / rifle at least that I didn't need to handload for given the excellent quality, cheap surplus 7.92 around in vast quantities and didn't bother buying dies, brass etc as I usually would when acquiring something in a new cartridge. After a single range session with surplus 198gn sS, I pulled some of this ammo and tried downloading it - didn't work, sooted-up brass, bolt and action and lousy groups, if you could call them 'groups'. So, back to buying yet another set of dies, brass, bullets to handload lighter bullets in mild loads.