AMD's new Zen 5 flagship gets benchmarked — Ryzen 9 9950X Engineering Sample isn't as impressive in Blender at maximum power settings

Since our last AMD Ryzen 9 9950X ES leaked benchmarks story, AnandTech forum member Igor_Kavinsky has continued posting new Engineering Sample benchmarks in his original thread. The enthusiast has now undertaken 253W PPT and "Unlimited" Package Power Tracking (PPT) testing. This is in addition to the previously-covered 90W, 120W, 160W, and 230W PPT results we've covered. We've also included our own Ryzen 9 7950X benchmarking results for a quick comparison with the newer chip.  

In our last article on these benchmarks, we noted that the Ryzen 9 9950X seems to boast significant efficiency improvements over the Ryzen 9 7950X, not just higher performance in general. In particular, it was noted that the Ryzen 9 9950X seems capable of outperforming the Ryzen 9 7950X even when operating at a lower maximum wattage. It also remained fairly competitive with the 170W Ryzen 7950X at wattages as low as 120W.

AMD Ryzen 9 9950X ES Blender Benchmark Scores

*Author's Note: My prior article on this topic referred to these power targets as "TDP" instead of "PPT". These are...mostly the same thing, but whereas TDP (Thermal Design Power) refers to the CPU's power target, PPT (Package Power Tracking) refers to all power being directed to the CPU socket, and adjustments change the maximum wattage to the socket, and thus real TDP is lower. "Unlimited PPT" allows for as much wattage as the CPU and socket can support.

Isolating the two new benchmark results, one has to immediately note that only minor improvements have been gained by pushing the PPT power limits to their absolute maximum. The 253W result with a 5.5 GHz overclock still maintains impressive temperatures of 61C or less thanks to the liquid cooling setup used with this ES. However, fully removing the power limits kicks up temps to 80C under liquid cooling while achieving only the most marginal of performance improvements.

In other words, the most impressive results here... still start at around 170W, compared to the preceding CPU. It is fully within expectations for a successor to outperform its predecessor at the same or higher power targets, but the efficiency gains remain the most impressive aspect of this story.

That said, it's still nice that the Ryzen 9 9950X could be pushed this far with (apparently) a standard liquid cooling setup, though we don't know if it was done with an AIO or a custom loop. Apparently, no CPU delidding was needed to achieve these results, and in fact doing so would have likely upset AMD, since this is an Engineering Sample that must eventually be returned, per Igor_Kavinski's secondhand reports. (Note that while Igor posts these benchmarks, an unnamed source is actually running them and sending them to him.)