AMD’s Ryzen 9 7900X has been benchmarked over at the infamous Userbenchmark platform (known for favoring Intel chips). Surprisingly, the high-end Zen 4 CPU seized the #1 spot from the Core i9-12900KS in the “Effective Speed” rankings chart. The single-threaded performance of the 12-core Raphael chip was a staggering 35% higher than the Core i9-12900K while still being 27% faster in heavily multi-threaded workloads.
Remember that we’re comparing a 12-core SKU to a 16-core part. Granted, the 7900X features 12 high-performance “Zen 4” cores while the 12900K comes with just 8 high-performance “Golden Cove” cores (and 8 low-power “Gracemont” cores). Going by the pricing, however, it’s still a very legitimate analogy. Interestingly, the boost clock of the Core i9 is higher than the Ryzen 9 7900X. The former has a turbo boost frequency of up to 5.4GHz while the latter tops out at 5.3GHz. This is almost certainly lower than its spec boost clock which should be at least 5.5GHz if not higher.
Other benchmarks including Geekbench 5 place the two CPUs much closer to one another. Going by a GB5 listing from this morning, the Ryzen 9 7900X is ahead by just 15-20% in the single-threaded and less than 10% faster than the Core i9-12900K in the multi-threaded benchmark. It’s possible that the variance in these results is due to the inclusion of AVX512 support on Zen 4, but it’s hard to say anything for certain at this point.
