Early benchmarks for AMD’s upcoming Ryzen 9 9950X are starting to make the rounds, and they already show some impressive performance gains. Igor Kavinski took to the Anandtech forums to share some benchmarks in Cinebench that were gathered with an engineering sample of the Ryzen 9 9950X, and AMD’s upcoming CPU already managed to outpace Intel’s Core i9-14900KS, according to Wccftech.
At 160 watts, the Ryzen 9 9950X managed a multi-core score of 42,336 in Cinebench R23, while the Core i9-14900KS reached 41,285 in its default Performance power profile. Intel’s CPU regains a lead in its Extreme power mode, but it also consumes 320 watts — double what the Ryzen 9 9950X sipped down. There’s a little more to the story outside of the raw score, though.
Kavinski was testing an engineering sample of the Ryzen 9 9950X. These are validation models, and they’re usually restricted in some way. For starters, the retail version of the Ryzen 9 9950X goes up to 170W. The CPU also reached a peak clock speed of 5.2GHz at 160W in Kavinski’s tests, while AMD claims the retail chip will be able to boost up to 5.7GHz. As if that wasn’t enough, Kavinski tested with DDR5-4800 memory. The Ryzen 9 9950X supports up to DDR5-8000 memory with the new 800-series chipset, and faster RAM would certainly boost the score more.
The result at 160W is the most interesting, as it’s the closest to what actual buyers can expect out of the CPU if they pick it up on release day. However, Kavinski ran several other passes at different power modes, from 40W all the way up to unlimited powered. In the unlimited mode, and with the assistance of liquid nitrogen for cooling, the Ryzen 9 9950X managed a score of 53,557 and consumed 309W. That’s a lot of power, but it’s still in the ballpark of the Core i9-14900KS in its Extreme power profile.
It’s not too surprising. Although the Core i9-14900KS is a monster CPU, it comes from the lukewarm Raptor Lake refresh generation. As you can read in our review of the Core i9-14900K, it wasn’t significantly faster than even AMD’s last-gen Ryzen 9 7950X. The comparison with the Ryzen 9 9950X will be Intel’s current flagship at the time of release, but we’ll have to wait until later in the year for the real battle to commence.
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Intel is introducing its 15th-gen Arrow Lake CPUs in the second half of the year. The real comparison will be between Ryzen 9000 and Arrow Lake later in the year. With the Ryzen 9 9950X launching on July 31, however, AMD will at least enjoy several months uncontested.
