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.

The 9950X is equally underwhelming on the productivity side, too. Hardware Unboxed found an actual regression in performance for compression and decompression work, and minor improvements over the 7950X in tests like Cinebench, Blender, and image editing in Photoshop. On average, the 9950X is just 3 percent faster than the 7950X during these productivity tests.

The results are a far cry from AMD’s big “monster” promises of performance gains in productivity as well as gaming. AMD described Zen 5 as a “big leap” it was “very proud of” in a press briefing with The Verge earlier this year.

JayzTwoCents says AMD has “fumbled this launch,” and it’s hard not to disagree. At a time when Intel’s 13th and 14th Gen CPUs have been suffering from crashing issues leading to extended warranties, many were looking to AMD’s new Zen 5 CPUs to offer up some solid competition for Intel. Now, it’s all eyes on Intel’s Arrow Lake desktop CPUs that are expected to launch later this year.