AMD Lifts the Curtain on Zen 5 Ryzen 9000 CPUs, Boasting Impressive Specs

AMD has unveiled the new Zen 5 Ryzen 9000 CPU range in depth, showcasing the increased performance, benchmarks, and features.

With so much excitement around AI and the new Snapdragon X Elite range of SoCs , AMD has taken the time to show what it has up its sleeve with the latest desktop processors consumers will soon be able to purchase. At an event taking place in LA, AMD gave journalists and industry experts some of the first looks at the new Zen 5 Ryzen 9000 series of processors and how they compare to Intel’s current offerings. Boasting some impressive benchmarks with productivity and gaming, Zen 5 is already looking like an exciting offering for people looking for their next desktop CPU upgrade.

Built on the AM5 platform, the Zen 5-based Ryzen 9000 series of processors carries on where Zen 4 left off, offering an uptick in performance that is ready for a range of workloads, including gaming, productivity, and content creation. The range is shown off with chips from the 65W Ryzen 5 9600X 6-core 12-thread CPU with a max boost of 5.4 GHz, all the way up to the flagship 170W Ryzen 9 9950X that features 16 cores 32 threads CPU with a max boost of up to 5.7 GHz.

“Boasting some impressive benchmarks with productivity and gaming, Zen 5 is already looking like an exciting offering for people looking for their next desktop CPU upgrade.”

According to the benchmarks shown at the event, the new Ryzen 9000 range shows a noticeable improvement over their current Intel-based counterparts. Game performance benchmarks are also impressive, with games like Cyberpunk 2077 , F1 2023 , and Horizon Zero Dawn showing double-digit percentage increases, some great news for gamers looking for the best options currently on the market. The benchmarks showcase some fantastic numbers in encoding in Handbrake across the full range, all while boasting less power draw compared to the Ryzen 7000 range (at least in everything beyond the Ryzen 9 9950X).

It makes sense that, with the announcement of the new Ryzen 9000 series, AMD also detailed the overclocking capabilities of the new chips. Depending on how much performance you are looking to get out of the new processors, the capabilities have been improved in a series of ways.

Memory overclocking has seen a series of improvements with Zen 5, giving new capabilities for the end user to take advantage of. It will now be possible to memory overclock on the fly, with there being options to change the memory profile from within the Ryzen Overclock app. This makes it now possible to jump from a stable profile while working to a more performative but less stable one when you want to get the best experience possible while gaming.

Zen 5 also brings with it support for up to EXPO DDR5-8000 profiles, compared to EXPO DDR5-6000 on Zen 4 , and JEDEC support for DDR5-5600 memory, providing a notable boost in performance beyond what the CPUs bring through their new clock speeds and on-chip increases. But that is before we even dive into chip overclocking, which gives even more potential to push your CPU farther to squeeze every frame possible from gaming or other intensive applications.

“While the new Ryzen 9000 CPU runs perfectly on the current AM5 board offerings, there were announcements of a new AMD motherboard chipset that looks to take advantage of all the features the new Ryzen 9000 series brings to the table.”

AMD has brought to the table the ability to one-click overclock with the new Precision Boost Overdrive, giving a notable increase in performance at the cost of efficiency. While this is not as extreme as is possible when pushing the CPUs due to the headroom available in most of the range, it can provide an increase of 6-15 percent, depending on the CPU.  This is all before jumping into the Curve Shaper overclocking feature, which gives more ways to push the CPUs a series of enhancements that allow the end user to push their chips further and deliver the most performance possible.

With all the enhancements, you may be wondering, in the age of AI, if there was any consideration for how Zen 5 will take on local models. While not as focused on AI as the Ryzen AI range of laptop chips, Zen 5 does help see some improvements with the new AVX512/VINNI acceleration support compared to the same models running on Intel’s 14th-gen chips . While not massive, according to AMD’s benchmarks detailed during the event, this offers up to a 17 percent improvement in Lama and a 20 percent improvement in Mistral when looking at the tokens per second the CPU can manage.

While the new Ryzen 9000 CPU runs perfectly on the current AM5 board offerings, there were announcements of a new AMD motherboard chipset that looks to take advantage of all the features the new Ryzen 9000 series brings to the table. The new AMD 800 chipset is an iterative update that brings a series of new boards for people looking to build a new AM5-based Ryzen system. The top-end AMD X870E boasts the most features, including PCIe Gen 5 on both the NVMe and graphics, USB 4, allows for overclocking on both the memory and the CPU, and offers up 1×16 and 2×8 for graphics, making it comparable to Intel’s Z790 based boards .

The new AMD X870 offers most of the same features and offers a similar experience to what the current AMD X670 boards bring to the table. Moving down the line, the new AMD B850 offers a more affordable option while making some compromises. It features PCIe Gen 5 for the NVMe but only offers Gen 4 for graphics. It also boasts USB 3.2 compared to the USB 4 found on the X870 and X870E boards, with it comparable to the current AMD B760 boards.

Last, the AMD B840 is the most affordable in the range. Still, it only features PCIe Gen 3 and USB 3.2, only allows the end user to overclock the memory, and loses out on the 2×8 graphics, making it more of an option for people wanting a system that works but one they don’t intend to push for the most performance possible.

With Zen 5, AMD is looking to showcase its performance potential further in the desktop space. It boasts some impressive benchmarks that are sure to make anyone looking to upgrade or build a new system very happy. As impressive as the numbers look on paper, until we see some real-world tests, everything should be taken with a grain of salt.

Thankfully, we won’t have long to wait. The new Ryzen 9000 series will hit stores on July 31st, and no firm details on pricing have been revealed yet. We will do our best to deliver comprehensive coverage to help you plan if this new range is as impressive as it looks on paper, so stay tuned to CGMagazine for everything AMD as we inch closer to the launch.