AMD is launching its Ryzen 9000 processors later this month, which use its Zen 5 architecture.
The company revealed more information about these new products this week at a tech day event, including the performance of the Ryzen 9 9950X, Ryzen 9 9900X, Ryzen 7 9700X, and Ryzen 5 9600X, a new overclocking/underclocking feature called Curve Shaper, and additional details about the Zen 5 architecture.
A live benchmarking session saw Cinebench numbers for the flagship Ryzen 9 9950X revealed. The test system here is different to the one used for the other results below, but still shows the new 16-core processor easily outstripping everything from current generations of processors and beating the Ryzen 9 7950X by nine per cent.
This score increased to 43,895 with Precision Boost Overdrive enabled and further still using Curve Shaper to 44,538.
Stepping down to the Ryzen 9 9900X, which has 12 cores and 24 threads, AMD showed its benchmark numbers compared to the Core i9-14900K. These results should be taken with a pinch of salt, as they are likely cherry-picked.
However, they still show impressive leads over Intel’s current flagship CPU in games such as F1 2023 and Cyberpunk 2077, as well as outside of games in applications such as Photoshop, Blender, and HandBrake.
The same was true for the Ryzen 7 9700X, which is compared to the Core i7-14700K.
AMD showed a graph showing performance for the Ryzen 7 9700X to be higher than the Ryzen 7 5800X3D in games. That processor has 3D V-Cache that enhances gaming performance in most titles. Still, AMD stopped short of comparing it with Ryzen 7000X3D models, which are expected to offer similar or better performance thanks to their 3D V-Cache despite using the older Zen 4 architecture.
Finally, the same benchmarks were used to compare the Ryzen 5 9600X with the Intel Core i5-14600K.
AMD revealed a new addition to its overclocking and undervolting tools: Curve Shaper. This builds on the popular Curve Optimiser tool, which allows users to reduce the voltage and temperatures of their Ryzen 7000 processors. The new Curve Shaper allows you to adjust the underlying voltage curves and selectively add or remove additional steps to adjust the underlying curves using 15 different frequency-temperature bands. This allows users to reduce voltage to stable bands and add it to those that are not.
The new CPUs will support memory kits up to DDR5-8000, feature on-the-fly overclocking and profile features via Ryzen Master, and, as usual, all AMD chipsets will support memory overclocking via memory profiles.
AMD is bringing enhanced memory support to Ryzen 9000, including higher frequencies, on-the-fly overclocking, and memory overclocking/higher than JEDEC support on all chipsets.
AMD offered a small insight into temperatures we can expect with Ryzen 9000 processors
. At its recent Tech Day event, temperatures seemed normal or above normal on early systems. Still, AMD claimed that at similar TDPs, equivalent Ryzen 9000 CPUs will offer a seven degree improvement over Ryzen 7000 models. This will be an area to watch when reviews land, given how hot previous models ran out of the box, although they could be made to run cooler with undervolting.