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