The Ryzen 9 6900HX is a waste of money when compared to the Ryzen 7 6800H and the benchmarks are proof

Many high-end gaming laptops this year with AMD CPUs have begun shipping with Ryzen 7 6800H and Ryzen 9 6900HX Zen 3+ options. The latter, of course, is expected to be faster than the former to the eyes of a potential customer especially since SKUs with the Ryzen 9 6900HX are priced higher than those with the Ryzen 7 6800H. After testing 8 different laptops with these two processors, however, their performance differences are so marginal that it's becoming difficult for us to recommend the 6900HX.

Our table below shows the 8 laptops in question and their various CPU benchmark results. The 6800H performs so closely to the 6900HX that some models with the 6800H are even able to edge out the 6900HX. The recently released Lenovo Legion 5 Pro 16ARH7H with the 6800H, for example, outperforms the Asus Zephyrus Duo 16 with the supposedly "faster" 6900HX. The Lenovo model offers a more expensive 6900HX SKU, but we doubt it would be any faster than the 6800H SKU especially since we've recorded CPU temperatures of almost 95 C on the 6800H model.

There's a small chance that a new model with the Ryzen 9 6900HX will come in the future with performance levels that will blow us away, but we're not holding our breath. We recommend checking out our review on the Ryzen 7 6800H-powered Lenovo Legion 5 Pro 16 for more benchmarks and information.