Recap: Last week, AMD announced the 7000-series and scheduled its launch for September 27. If you missed our recap of the event, the bottom line is this: these processors will gorge themselves on power to reach astronomical clock speeds but are otherwise fairly similar to their predecessors.
The Ryzen 9 7950X is AMD’s flagship and will cost $100 less than the 5950X, $700. It has 16 cores / 32 threads, 5.7 GHz boost, and 4.5 GHz base clocks. Those speeds, an increased cache capacity, and other IPC improvements culminate in what AMD says is a 29% single-core performance gain over the 5950X.
So it shouldn’t be surprising to see it flying past the 5950X in the first leaked benchmarks. Like the 7700X and 7600X, the 7950X has been put through the paces in the Cinebench R23 render test.
Enthusiasts in China acquired several engineering and production samples and started publishing benchmark results last week. Some of their posts have already been taken down, but higher scores keep appearing daily. All of them claim that their scores were achieved without overclocking, which is believable given that the flagship Ryzen processors already have notoriously little overclocking headroom.
Still, take these figures with a grain of salt. The highest multi-core score achieved so far is 38,984 points. It comes from a screenshot of an engineering sample running the benchmark shared to the Chiphell forums.
In another example, Twitter user “Raichu” scored 37,452 points with a production sample. Raichu also shared some additional info: their CPU had an all-core clock speed of 5.1 GHz and consumed 240 W during the benchmark, resulting in temps of up to 96° C despite a 360 mm AIO watercooler.
Screenshots of yet another production sample running the benchmark posted to Baidu show the processor hit a score of 36,256 points with an unspecified water cooling solution. The same processor only reached 29,649 points when it had just an air cooler (not a very good one, evidently).
For some context, the 5950X can be pushed to ~30,000 points with minor effort and usually lands in the ballpark of 25,000 – 30,000 points in most systems. It can go higher, but it also runs into temperature problems. Being a bit generous and using 30,000 as a baseline, the 7950X is 20-30% faster than those leaked results, which is right around that 29% figure that AMD promised.
For those willing to take it with an extra large helping of salt, you can also compare the 7950X results against the leaked Intel Core i9-13900K results from last month. Intel’s upcoming flagship achieved a score of 40,616 points while consuming over 340 W and 35,693 points while limited to 240 W.
Compared to the 5950X and 13900K, the 7950X proves itself a worthy inheritor of the Ryzen crown in Cinebench R23 if those numbers are valid. Stay tuned for our upcoming reviews of the 7950X and the 7900X, 7700X, and 7600X, when we’ll give you a comprehensive analysis.
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