AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X has been the subject of another leak, and the upcoming Zen 5 flagship easily outperforms Intel's Core i9-14900KS, the fastest chip in Team Blue's current CPU lineup.
Wccftech noticed that Igor Kavinski posted even more leaked benchmarks (on the Anandtech forums) using an engineering sample (pre-release chip) of the Ryzen 9950X.
When supplied with unlimited power (or “Emperor Palpatine” mode, as we like to call it), the 9950X achieved an astonishing Cinebench R23 score of 48,011 for multi-threaded performance.
That's 12.5% faster than a Core i9-14900KS in the same test, Wccftech reports (the Intel chip hits 42,678).
In fact, even when supplied with just 160W in Kavinski's lowest-power test, the 9950X nearly matched the 14900KS, scoring 42,336. At 200W, Ryzen's next-gen flagship comfortably outperformed the 14900KS, scoring 44,782.
Analysis: Very promising leaks
Remember that this is just an engineering sample, so it's not the finished silicon, which will likely be even better in the end. The sample chip has lower clock speeds (as expected), but that said, there are caveats here in that the leaker manually tuned the CPU to perform better via PBO and Curve Optimizer, and a cool custom water-cooling system was also installed for the processor to benefit from.
This is clearly an impressive showing ahead of launch, anyway, and Kavinski has issued other comparisons since these Cinebench runs. That includes a performance-per-watt battle of the 9950X against an optimized 7950X (results for the latter come courtesy of Det0x) that shows the new CPU outperforming the current-gen flagship at higher power levels. (The low-power results appear to favor the 7950X, but that's likely related to poor optimization for the 9950X—we'll only know when a launch version of the Zen 5 processor is properly tested.)
Overall, enthusiasts looking for a powerful and seemingly highly efficient flagship CPU will be very excited by these leaked results, and we’re less than a couple of weeks away from the release of the Ryzen 9000 family. The Ryzen 9 9950X, along with the 9900X (which impressed again in another recent leak), plus the 9700X and 9600X are all set to launch on July 31, AMD recently confirmed. All we need to know now is the pricing…
