What I’m looking forward to: AMD is set to unveil its Zen 5 lineup later this month, and the latest reports suggest that the new chips could offer a significant upgrade over the previous generation of chips, especially for users looking for the best 3D modeling, animation, rendering, video editing, and compositing solutions on the market.
The information comes from Anandtech forum user Igor_Kavinski, who posted Blender benchmarks of the Ryzen 9 9950X at multiple TDPs over the past few days, with results ranging from 90W, 120W, 160W, and 230WIt gives potential buyers an idea about both its performance and power efficiency.
The Ryzen 9 9950X achieved an overall Blender score of 327.7 at 60W, and a significantly higher 486.9 points at 90W. At 120W, the new chip scored a very impressive 576 points, and at 160W it achieved 678 points. By comparison, the Ryzen 9 7950X only managed 599.2 points at 170W (courtesy of Hail The Brain Slug), suggesting that the 9950X may be significantly faster and more efficient than its predecessor.
The most interesting results come when both chips are tested at 230W: in that PPT, the 9950X scores 353.4 in the Monster test within Blender, 226.2 in Junkshop, and 171.3 in Classroom – consistently about 20 percent higher than the 297.3, 180.2, and 139.9 points that the 7950X scored in the three aforementioned benchmarks, respectively.
The score is even more impressive when you consider that the chip Kavinski got hold of was only an engineering sample, not the final retail product. Engineering samples are used for testing purposes and often have lower clock speeds compared to retail SKUs, so they don’t always offer the best performance. In this case, the 9950X ES has a maximum boost speed of 5.62 GHz, which is lower than the chip’s official turbo clock of 5.7 GHz.
Our Ryzen 9 9950X test system used AMD’s Precision Boost Overdrive feature, which provides a slight performance boost over the default settings, and was also liquid-cooled so temperatures never exceeded 62 degrees. Other hardware specifications for our test PC are currently unknown.
