Leaked AMD Ryzen 9950X benchmarks appear to show Intel how a flagship CPU is done, easily outgunning the Core i9-14900KS
Intel’s special edition 14th-gen flagship is eating dust, by the looks of it
![AMD AM5 Ryzen 7000 Engineering Sample](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/GkWjbMgNnCQh9tVvH3asXd-320-80.jpg)
AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X has been the subject of another leak, with the incoming Zen 5 flagship easily outgunning Intel’s Core i9-14900KS, the fastest chip in Team Blue’s current CPU range.
Wccftech noticed that Igor Kavinski posted yet 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 a staggering Cinebench R23 score of 48,011 for multi-threaded performance.
That’s 12.5% faster than a Core i9-14900KS in the same test as Wccftech points out (the Intel chip hits 42,678).
Indeed, even when supplied with just 160W in Kavinski’s lowest-powered test run, the 9950X almost equaled the 14900KS, scoring 42,336. At 200W, the Ryzen next-gen flagship comfortably beat the 14900KS, achieving a result of 44,782.
Analysis: Very promising leaks
Remember, this is just an engineering sample – so 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 did manually tweak the CPU to run better via PBO and Curve Optimizer – and a sterling custom water-cooling system was in place for the processor to benefit from, too.
Still, this is clearly an impressive pre-release showing, and Kavinski has aired some other comparisons since these Cinebench runs. That includes a performance-per-watt battle of the 9950X versus an optimized 7950X (results for the latter come courtesy of Det0x) showing the new CPU blowing away the current-gen flagship at higher power levels. (Low power usage results appear to favor the 7950X, but that’s likely to be tied up in wonky optimization for the 9950X – we’ll only know when a release version of the Zen 5 processor is run through its paces properly).
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Overall, enthusiasts looking for a powerful and seemingly highly efficient flagship CPU are going to be pretty stoked by these leaked results – and we have less than a couple of weeks before the Ryzen 9000 family is out. The Ryzen 9 9950X, alongside the 9900X (which again impressed in another recent leak), plus the 9700X and 9600X are set to launch on July 31 as recently confirmed by AMD. All we need now is to know the price tags…
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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).