AMD’s new Zen 5 CPUs do not impress in initial tests

AMD launched its first Zen 5 desktop processors earlier this month, and is about to release a seemingly disappointing flagship CPU tomorrow called the Ryzen 9 9950X. Early reviews of the first Zen 5 CPUs – the Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 5 9600X – showed a lack of performance improvements and efficiency, and now reviews of the flagship Ryzen 9 9950X come to the same conclusion.

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

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

The 9950X isn’t exactly impressive in terms of productivity either. Hardware Unboxed found an actual drop in performance in compression and decompression tasks, and there were minor improvements over the 7950X in tests like Cinebench, Blender, and image editing in Photoshop. On average, the 9950X is only 3 percent faster than the 7950X in these productivity tests.

The results are far from AMD’s big “monster” promises of performance gains in both productivity and gaming. AMD described Zen 5 in a press conference as The edge beginning of the year.

JayzTwoCents says AMD “messed up this launch,” and it’s hard to disagree. At a time when Intel’s 13th and 14th generation CPUs suffered from crashing issues that led to extended warranties, many were pinning their hopes on AMD’s new Zen 5 CPUs to provide solid competition to Intel. Now, all eyes are on Intel’s Arrow Lake desktop CPUs, which are expected to launch later this year.