Daily Morning News

AMD’s new Zen 5 CPUs fail to impress during early reviews

AMD launched its first Zen 5 desktop processors earlier this month, and tomorrow, it’s about to release what looks like a disappointing flagship Ryzen 9 9950X CPU. Early reviews of the initial Zen 5 CPUs — the Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 5 9600X — revealed a lack of performance improvements and efficiencies, and now reviews of the flagship Ryzen 9 9950X are coming to the same conclusion.

Hardware Unboxed has tested a variety of productivity workloads and games with the 9950X, and the results make the previous generation Ryzen 9 7950X chip look like a better value in most cases.

Over a 13-game average running at 1080p with an RTX 4090, Hardware Unboxed found that the 9950X was just a single percent faster than the existing 7950X. AMD’s new flagship Zen 5 CPU is offering the same level of performance as two years ago, essentially. There are no real efficiency improvements on the power side, either. “From a gaming perspective, the 9950X is a complete and utter flop,” concludes Hardware Unboxed’s Steve Walton.