Leaked benchmarks have surfaced online for AMD's mainstream Ryzen 9000 processors, the incoming mid-range 9600X and 9700X, showing some supposed major performance gains over Team Red's current Ryzen 7000 equivalents.
As spotted by Videocardz, Geekbench 6 scores have appeared for these two next-gen Zen 5 processors showing impressive results (add seasoning as ever with leaks).
The AMD Ryzen 5 9600X (with six-cores and 12-threads) managed an impressive 3,284 in single-core and 14,594 in multi-core. For reference, this is around 6% faster than the top-end Intel Core i9-14900K, but the Ryzen CPU will obviously be available for a far cheaper price.
As for the multi-core performance of the 9600X, it's solid, but expectedly slower than Intel's 14th-gen Core i7 and i9 processors, as well as high-end Ryzen 7000 chips due to their greater amount of cores and threads. However, that score of 14,594 is 13% faster than the current AMD Ryzen 7600X. So overall, these are impressive figures for a six-core CPU.
It's a similar story with the upcoming AMD Ryzen 7 9700X, which has a reported single-core result of 3,312 and a multi-core of 16,431 (again in Geekbench 6). For context, that's a full 7% faster than Intel's 14900K in the former category, even if it can't quite compete in terms of multi-core performance. Still, for an eight-core processor these numbers are encouraging.
If we compare the 9700X to the current 7700X, the Zen 5 upgrade shows a sizeable uplift of 13% in single-core and 7% in multi-core performance. While that won't likely be enough to persuade 7700X owners to upgrade, gamers will certainly benefit from that single-core uptick here if they're jumping onto Team Red's Ryzen platform for the first time.
AMD looks set to continue its value play for gamers
Single-core performance remains the most important factor when gaming, and both these next-gen Ryzen CPUs deliver in this respect. Should these leaked Geekbench 6 benchmarks be accurate, then the Ryzen 9600X and 9700X might be considered among the best processors for their price-to-performance ratios.
So, if all this pans out, it'll be heartening to see relatively wallet-friendly Ryzen chips outclass their rival's flagship offerings in some respects, even if they aren't anywhere near as good for creativity or productivity.
