AMD strikes back: Ryzen 9 7945HX beats Intel Core i9-13980HX despite much lower power consumption

The new Ryzen 9 7945HX can reach up to 5.4 GHz on a single core and we can confirm this value during our benchmarks. All in all, AMD can almost close the gap to Intel, only the Core i9-13980HX still has a slightly advantage thanks to its high single-core turbo of up to 5.6 GHz. However, AMD is better in terms of power consumption: We measure 27W for the cores, while the performance cores in the Intel Core i9-13980HX consume between 34-36 Watts. 

The performance advantage over the old Ryzen 9 6900HX with the Zen3+ cores is also impressive and we see an average advantage of 27 % in our single-core benchmarks.

The multi-core performance is really impressive and the Ryzen 9 7945HX is sitting at the top of our comparison charts, even ahead of the latest Raptor Lake HX CPUs from intel. The advantage over the old Ryzen 9 6900HX in the previous Zephyrus Duo 16 (at 80W though) is also impressive.

We have already performed some gaming benchmarks and the initial results for the Ryzen 9 7945HX look good, but we want to collect more data before we can give a final verdict on the gaming performance.

In addition to the default power levels, we also checked the performance of the new Ryzen 9 7945HX at lower TDP values and the results are extremely good, which is visivible in the following table. We also included the results for the Intel Core i9-13980HX at the same power levels.

It is very obvious that Intel's best Raptor Lake mobile processor does not stand a chance against the new Zen 4 CPU at similar TDP levels. The sweet spot for the Ryzen 9 7945HX is definitely in the range between 80-100 Watts where we can only see a minor performance deficit.

The benchmark results above obviously do not give us a full picture yet, but the initial results are extremely positive. AMD managed to close the gap in terms of single-core performance with lower power consumption. The new Zen 4 chip is even faster in multi-core benchmarks and still consumes considerably less power at just 120 Watts, which means laptop manufacturer get more headroom for the cooling of the GPU, for example.

We are currently working on a comprehensive analysis article as well as the review of the new Asus Zephyrus Duo 16 with the Ryzen 9 7945HX in combination with the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop. It seems AMD's Zen 4 chips have an advantage over Intel, but we also have to wait and see if there will be a sufficient number of laptop models with the new CPUs. AMD already offered the best mobile CPU for thin and light notebooks with the Ryzen 7 6800U, but the availability was very limited and customers often did not have an alaternative to Intel CPUs.