Four of AMD’s forthcoming Zen 5 CPUs have apparently just been benchmarked, and their results show a definite uptick in performance compared to the company’s current chips. This latest AMD Ryzen benchmark leak comes straight from the Geekbench results browser, and purportedly reveals the performance of not only the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X, but also the new Ryzen 9 9900X and 9950X.
All four of these new CPUs are based on the upcoming AMD Zen 5 architecture, and are prime candidates for our best gaming CPU guide if AMD can get the pricing right. The Ryzen 7 9700X has eight cores and a maximum boost clock of 5.5GHz, while the Ryzen 5 9600X has six cores and the ability to boost its clock speed to up to 5.4GHz. Meanwhile, the top-end Ryzen 9 chips include the 12-core 9900X and 16-core 9950X.
Let’s start with the two cheaper chips. According to the Geekbench browser results pages, which you can see here and here, both the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X have been put through their paces on an Asus ROG Crosshair X670E Hero motherboard, equipped with 32GB of 6,000MHz DDR5 RAM.
In both cases, the maximum detected clock frequency is 73-74MHz higher than AMD’s stated boost clocks, which may result from a small overclock, or it could just be down to Geekbench not accurately detecting the clock speeds from this early silicon.
The six-core Ryzen 5 9600X picks up from the current Ryzen 5 7600X at the budget end of AMD’s lineup. This chip produced a single-core score of 3,284 according to the Geekbench browser. That’s a good 14.5% faster than the score of 2,868 from the current Ryzen 5 7600X average in the same test, showing that AMD’s claim of a 16% average increase in instructions per clock with this generation isn’t far off the mark at this level. Meanwhile, the multi-core score of 14,594 is 13.7% quicker than the 7600X.
Next up is the Ryzen 7 9700X benchmark, which reportedly clocked up a single-core score of 3,312. This is a little higher than the 9600X’s result, thanks to this CPU’s extra clock speed, and represents a 13.7% performance increase over the Ryzen 7 7700X in the same test. Meanwhile, this CPU’s eight cores enabled it to hit a multi-core result of 16,431. This is up a bit from the 15,272 average scored by the 7700X, but only by 7.6%
If you’re looking for more processing power, one more CPU that was apparently benched on this Asus test rig is the new flagship 16-core Ryzen 9 9950X. In this Ryzen 9 9950X benchmark, the new CPU apparently produced a single-core result of 3,359, thanks to its 5.7GHz boost clock. Meanwhile, its 16 cores helped it to a multi-core score of 20,550, marking a 6.6% performance improvement over the Ryzen 9 7950X, though it’s still behind the 20,878 average from the Intel Core i9 14900K.
Finally, a result has also now appeared from a different test rig, which apparently puts the 12-core Ryzen 9 9900X under the microscope. This result comes from a test machine based on an ASRock X670E Steel Legend motherboard, with 32GB of DDR5 RAM, and sees the 12-core CPU hitting a multi-core score of 18,064, with a single-core score of 3,231. However, as this is based on a different motherboard, and we don’t know the speed of the memory, the results aren’t directly comparable to the results from the Asus rig.
Of course, none of these CPUs have been officially released yet, and the motherboards in these test rigs will be running with beta BIOS versions to support these new CPUs, so take this with the usual pinch of salt for now.
We’ll have to wait until the official Zen 5 launch before we know how these CPUs fully perform, but the indications here are that the new Zen 5 CPUs will definitely be quicker than the equivalent Zen 4 chips, particularly in single-core applications, but also in multi-threaded software.
However, the performance difference purportedly shown by these results doesn’t look hugely transformative. If the final silicon performs similarly, it looks as though Zen 5 will be a great upgrade from Zen 3, but your Zen 4 CPU will be fine for a good while yet.
In the meantime, if you’re looking to buy a new gaming CPU, check out our Ryzen 7 7800X3D review, as this eight-core chip is our current top recommendation for games.