AMD's flagship Zen 5 desktop CPU impresses in new rendering benchmarks — Ryzen 9 9950X outperforms Ryzen 9 7950X by 24%

AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X, which will compete against the best CPUs, might not be out just yet (arriving July 31st), but that hasn't stopped a PC enthusiast from posting benchmarks of the chip in prototype form. Igor_kavinski posted a gauntlet of Cinebech R23 benchmark runs featuring an engineering sample Ryzen 9 9950X on the AnandTech forums, featuring various power targets to see how efficient AMD's Zen 5 desktop flagship is.

Igor posted ten total benchmark runs of the ES 9950X operating at 40W, 60W, 80W, 100W, 120W, 160W, 200W, 230W, 253W and 9999W. The 16-core Zen 5 flagship posted an impressive 48,011 score at full tilt. That is 24% faster than the Ryzen 9 7950X, which scored a 38,638 result (with PBO) in our review. The Ryzen 9 9950X was also up to 34% faster than the Ryzen 9 7950X3D, which posted a 35,630 score in our review of that chip.

Considering the other power targets, the Ryzen 9 9950X starts hitting a wall beyond the 160W limit, where adding additional power starts to achieve diminishing returns. For example, the jump from 120W to 160W represents a 16% performance improvement, but adding even more power, from 160W to 200W, yields a measly 5% improvement. This trend continues to 9999W, where more power only results in minor performance improvements.

160W appears to be the sweet spot for the Ryzen 9 9950X. Performance improvements are immense, going from 40W all the way to 160W. The double-digit power targets yield the most performance margins. For instance, going from 40W to 60W yields a whopping 51% performance improvement, and going from 60W to 80W yields an even more significant 81% performance improvement.

Igor also bundled his results with another user's results that ran the same power limit configuration in R23 but on the older Ryzen 9 7950X. However, please don't read into the 7950X results too seriously, as the user confirmed they were using air cooling and running into a 95C throttle point, which inevitably is bottlenecking the chip's performance at the higher power targets. The Ryzen 7000 is designed to hit 95 degrees Celsius, but the air cooler is still most likely bottlenecking the chip's performance.

Igor's R23 benchmarks give us insight into AMD's decision to keep the 170W power target the same on the Ryzen 9 9950X as the previous generation part. Performance scaling appears to be very similar to the 7950X in that both scale to 160W before both start hitting diminishing returns. The Ryzen 9 9950X is the only chip that retains the same TDP as its predecessor, with the rest of the Ryzen 9000 product stack boasting significantly lower TDPs than their Ryzen 7000 counterparts.