AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX leak shows what could be a laptop chip that can be overclocked

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Whatever the ‘HX’ suffix means, this processor should be a promising performer

AMD Ryzen 5000
(Image credit: AMD)

A purported next-gen chip for laptops from AMD, the Ryzen 9 5900HX, has been spotted online, generating much excitement because this mobile chip might just allow for overclocking.

The ‘HX’ designation could theoretically be like Intel’s ‘HK’ mobile processors which are unlocked and allow laptop gamers to overclock their CPUs and get that little bit more performance out of them.

The Ryzen 9 5900HX (from the ‘Cezanne’ family) was highlighted on Twitter by Tum_Apisak, one of the most regularly posting hardware leakers around, who found the chip on the Geekbench database (inside an Asus ROG Zephyrus gaming laptop – more about that later).

According to the Geekbench result presented, the 5900HX will be an 8-core chip (16-thread) clocked at 3.3GHz with boost to 4.6GHz. It has 16MB of L3 cache, double that of existing Ryzen 4000 mobile parts.

As Tom’s Hardware notes, the ‘X’ part of the suffix could indicate a chip that can be overclocked as mentioned, or possibly a better-performing model with beefier clocks (which would still be good news on the speed front, of course).

Single-core speed

As for the score that the 5900HX achieved, it managed 1,423 in single-core, which is a good chunk faster than the 4900HS – about 30% better, in fact. Although as ever, don’t read too much into a single benchmark, particularly a leaked one. And indeed the multi-core score appears to be wonky, as at 6,912, it’s actually slightly lower than the 4900HS typically achieves – indicating that there might be something amiss with the results here.

At any rate, the sighting of this chip, and a potentially overclock-capable mobile part for Ryzen 5000 mobile is the really interesting bit here, although the laptop that the 5900HX was spotted in is worth commenting on too.

The ROG Zephyrus notebook in question is apparently the GX551QS, which after further digging, Tum_Apisak found listed as a Zephyrus Duo 15 SE model – which is a dual-screen laptop (technically, the second screen is a ScreenPad Plus, a smaller display which shares the lower half of the portable with a keyboard).

We should know more about AMD’s plans soon enough, because Ryzen 5000 mobile chips are expected to be revealed at CES 2021, which is just around the corner now at the start of January.

Ryzen 5000 desktop CPUs have, of course, just recently been launched and are already selling very well – although stock levels have been an issue (although nothing like the problems seen with AMD’s new Big Navi GPUs).

Darren Allan

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).

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