AMD Ryzen 9 7940HX Dragon Range CPU benchmarked alongside new Asus gaming laptop

Unlike the Ryzen 8000 Hawk Point laptop APUs, the Ryzen 9 7940HX didn't get a pompous launch. Instead, it was hidden away in a spec sheet for the upcoming Asus TUF Gaming A16 ($947 on Amazon) variant. The China-only SKU has now been benchmarked alongside the ASUS Tianxuan 5 Pro by Bilibili creator "Wheat Milk Mitsu" (machine translated).

Essentially, the Ryzen 9 7940HX is an underclocked version of the Ryzen 9 7945HX. It is an 16-core, 32-thread processor with its boost clock nerfed to 5.2 GHz. The slight clock regression doesn't make much of a difference, though, as it scores 1,882 and 33,284 points in Cinebench R23's single and multi-core tests. This is marginally slower (1,948 single-core, 34,63 multi-core) than our fastest Ryzen 9 7945HX sample found alongside the Alienware m18 R1 AMD Edition.

Gaming performance, on the other hand, was noticeably different. At 1080p, CPU-bound titles such as Counter-Strike 2, the Ryzen 9 7940HX (308 FPS) lagged behind the Ryzen 9 7945HX (378 FPS). At 1440p, the gap further widened. Both test configs ran a GeForce RTX 4070 GPU, although their cooling solutions may differ. Its power consumption steadied out at around 120 Watts, and the clocks settled in at a little below 5.0 GHz, which is a little below advertised.

Overall, only a handful of gamers playing CPU-bound FPS titles would notice the difference between a Ryzen 9 7940HX and a Ryzen 9 7945HX. Both chips are practically identical otherwise, and one can't help but wonder why AMD launched the xx40 variant in the first place because it conflicts with its own naming scheme.Thankfully, this doesn't seem to be China-only CPU and will be available globally.