AMD Ryzen 9 9950X Flagship “Zen 5” 16-Core CPU Tested From 40W Up To 230W, Matches Core i9-14900KS At 160W In Cinebench

AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X, the fastest Zen 5 Desktop CPU, has been tested in Cinebench & matches Intel's top 14900KS chip at just 160W.

AMD Ryzen 9 9950X 16 Core CPU Delivers 14900KS 24 Core CPU Performance At Just 160W, Competitor Runs At Above 250W

The latest benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X 16-Core "Zen 5" Desktop CPU have been published by Anandtech forum member, Igor_kavinski, who previously showcased the full performance scaling potential of the flagship in Blender at various TDPs. For the latest tests, Cinebench R23 was selected as the go-to benchmark and the results are quite amazing.

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Starting with the specifications, the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X "100-000001277" CPU is the flagship offering with two Zen 5 CCDs and a single IOD. The CPU offers 16 cores, 32 threads, a base clock of 4.3 GHz, and a max boost clock of up to 5.7 GHz. It comes with 80 MB of cache (64 MB L3 + 16 MB L2) and has a TDP of 170W. Now in terms of clock speed, while the boost clock is identical to the Ryzen 9 7950X, the base clock is slightly dialed down by -200 MHz but we can expect a lot of efficiency coming out of this flagship product, especially in terms of multi-threaded performance.

Once again, Igor's results come from a source running an ES (Engineering Sample) version of the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X CPU which is rated at lower clock speeds but was manually tweaked (PBO+CO) & tested at various target PPTs. For testing, stock 4800 MT/s DDR5 memory was used along with a custom water-cooling which seems to be quite hefty considering it can keep the chip at 60C even under a 230W PPT. We know that Ryzen CPUs run cooler, but it must still be a beast of a water-cooling setup to keep the chip this cool.

Cinebench R23 (Higher is Better)

Multi-Thread 090001800027000360004500054000 090001800027000360004500054000 Ryzen 9 9950X (230W) 46090 Ryzen 9 9950X (200W) 44782 Core i9-14900KS