The first round of AMD Ryzen 9 9900X testing is in and the processor shows a 20% uplift over its predecessor. Designed to go up against Intel’s best CPUs, the 12-core chip even gives Core i7-14700K and its beefy 20 cores a run for their money.
Putting AMD’s new chip up against Cinebench R23, the fine folks at Wccftech received data showing an impressive 14% uplift over 7900X. This improvement is even more significant as 9900X consumes less power at 120W TDP compared to the previous generation’s 170W. Better yet, these benchmarks use a retail chip installed on an X670E motherboard using AGESA 1.2.0.0 BIOS. It’s much more akin to what you’ll see when the CPU finally hits shelves later this month.
AMD Ryzen 9 9900X has a lot of headroom thanks to Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO). With PBO on, Ryzen 9 9900X claimed 34,500 points in the same Cinebench R23 test, i.e. a 20% uplift over the 7900X. That said, this came at the cost of more power consumption which sat at 170W. This means that users will have two compelling options: keeping Zen 5’s efficiency or blasting full power to unlock even more performance. I would choose the former as the Ryzen 9000 series should be plenty fast at its default settings.
Lastly, Wccftech has also learned that the gaming performance of the top dog Ryzen 9 9950X is very strong, though the outlet hasn’t shared any benchmarks. Until now, dual Core Complex Die (CCD) Ryzen processors have struggled with games, falling short of their smaller and cheaper single CCD siblings. If AMD manages to improve this aspect, then the eight-core X3D chips may lose their crown.
Ryzen 9 9900X is a 12-core/24-thread CPU clocked up to 5.6GHz, using AMD’s Zen 5 Granite Ridge architecture. This chip uses TSMC’s 4nm node and will replace its 7900X predecessor on the AM5 socket. If all goes to plan, 9900X will arrive at the end of the month as a drop-in replacement on all existing AM5 boards. In fact, some motherboard manufacturers have already published updated BIOS to support all Ryzen 9000 processors ahead of launch.