According to a new Geekbench 5 score, shared by @BenchLeaks on Twitter, the Ryzen 9 7900X garners a 30% lead over its predecessor, the Ryzen 9 5900X, in Geekbench 5 multi-core and single-core tests. It is enough to potentially land the all-new 7900X a spot in our best CPUs tier list once it arrives in our labs.
The Ryzen 9 7900X scored 2,167 points in the single-threaded test, while in the multi-threaded test, it scored 18,446. According to the official Geekbench browser stats page, the Ryzen 9 5900X scored 1,669 points in the single-core test and 13,946 points in the multi-core test.
This effectively gives the Ryzen 9 7900X a 30% lead in single-threaded performance and a 32% lead in multi-threaded performance over its predecessor. These are very similar stats to what AMD projected with Ryzen 7000 over Ryzen 5000, including a 29% generational gain in single-threaded speed and 45% in multi-threaded tasks.
We do not see the 45% gains here, but that is expected. CPU performance can change drastically depending on the workflow, so Geekbench 5 alone isn’t enough to judge CPU performance. At the very least, we see the same 30% gains in the single-threaded test of Geekbench.
Most of Geekbench 5’s gains can be attributed directly to the 13% IPC gain coming from the Zen 4 architecture and the 800MHz jump in boost frequency from 4.8GHz to 5.6GHz. But another speed improvement coming from Ryzen 7000 is the addition of AVX-512, which Geekbench 5 will use in its AES-XTS cryptography benchmark.
This also means that the Ryzen 9 7900X’s performance upgrades are attributed to better per-core performance since both the 7900X and 5900X share the same 12-core count.
Overall, we cannot use Geekbench 5 solely as a benchmark to judge CPU performance. However, it does give us a clue into the Ryzen 9 7900X’s performance outside of AMD’s official numbers. We can expect average performance gains to be around the 30% ballpark but expect performance to be far different in niche scenarios that can take advantage of Zen 4’s new architectural properties.