AMD's New Fire Range HX3D Mobile CPU With 3D V-Cache Blows The Lid Off Our Benchmarks
AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX3D Fire Range HX3D Preview Exclusive
If you're of a certain age, you might remember those Maxell cassette tape ads that featured a man in sunglasses in a recliner being literally blown away by the sound coming out of his hi-fi speakers. That's a bit like how we feel as we continue to test and benchmark this forthcoming laptop sporting AMD's new Ryzen 9 9955HX3D Fire Range HX3D mobile CPU. This chip sports sixteen cores of desktop-class Zen 5 power, backed up by an extra 64MB of L3 cache, thanks to AMD's second-generation 3D V-Cache.
msi raider a18 9955x3d and rtx 5090 front
Our test platform for this new AMD gaming CPU is MSI's Raider A18 HX gaming laptop, which is already up for preorder. As you could probably guess from the name, it's a big machine as gaming laptops go, with an 18" display and plenty of cooling for its desktop-class CPU. Indeed, it's no real secret that AMD's Fire Range "HX3D" processors are repackaged desktop silicon. This generation takes a lower hit to clock speeds compared to the desktop Ryzen 9 9950X3D, however, thanks to advancements in both chip architecture and packaging.
msi raider a18 9955x3d and rtx 5090 lid
Introducing AMD's Ryzen 9 9955HX3D For Beastly Gaming Laptops
We have a full review of MSI's killer laptop on the way, but we wanted to give you this exclusive sneak peek of the performance on offer with AMD's Ryzen 9 9955HX3D processor, which launches today. We're not kidding when we say this chip blew us away—metaphorically, at least. You don't have to take our word for it, though; check out these CPU-focused benchmarks. We'll have more tests in the full review including copious gaming benchmarks of course as well. So, make sure to check back in with us soon.
cpu z combined
Tap For A Closer View
First up, here's the basic specifications of this chip as reported by CPU-Z. There aren't really any surprises here, but it's nice to look at this to confirm expectations. CPU clocks will be a touch lower than expected, due to the use of spread spectrum on the laptop motherboard, but it doesn't make enough difference to matter much, as you'll see in a moment. AMD specifies that this part will boost as high as 5.4 GHz. We actually tracked the chip hitting around 4.4 GHz in an all-core workload boost and at a peak of 5.2 GHz on two cores. The chip's top-end 5.4GHz clock speed is representative of single core boost.
An Exclusive CPU Benchmark Preview Of AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX3 "Fire Range HX3D"
speedometer 3 ryzen 9 9955hx3d performance
We'll start off our barrage of benchmarks with BrowserBench Speedometer 3. This test uses a wide array of latency and throughput benchmarks to evaluate web application performance. it tests the responsiveness of web applications by simulating user interactions on real web pages, focusing on tasks like to-do lists, rich text editing, rendering charts, and reading news websites. We run this test using the latest version of Google Chrome with default browser settings. As you can see, the Raider A18 HX and its Ryzen 9 9955HX3D take away the gold in this benchmark, beating the latest Arrow Lake H efforts from Intel, Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite, and even Apple's M3 Max—even if only by a hair. We don't have M4 numbers to compare against just yet, but regardless this is a hell of a start.
cinebench24 ryzen 9 9955hx3d performance
Next up, everyone's favorite rendering benchmark: Cinebench 2024. Cinebench isn't purely synthetic; it uses the same framework as the professional Cinema 4D suite used by many animation studios and video production houses. Unsurprisingly, sixteen cores of Zen 5 take away the gold here. AMD's configurable TDP for this chip peaks at 75W, which is lower than the Ryzen AI MAX+ 395's 80W (as configured in the ASUS ROG Flow z13 tablet we tested), but this AMD CPU doesn't have to share its power budget with a massive integrated Radeon GPU like it does in Ryzen AI MAX. As a result, it's the fastest mobile chip we've ever tested by a wide margin.
pcmark10 ryzen 9 9955hx3d performance
UL PCMark 10 is a full-system test that uses a comprehensive array of desktop applications to check system speed across three categories. In this benchmark we see another outstanding performance, with the highest score we've ever seen in the Digital Content Creation test. Productivity and Essentials results slightly lag the Ryzen AI MAX, but this AMD chip doesn't have that chip architecture's 256-bit memory bus to lean on. Performance is still incredible, easily dunking on nearly everything else we've ever tested.
gb6 ryzen 9 9955hx3d performance
Geekbench 6 is another full-system benchmark that runs an array of tests to suss out high level CPU performance. Unlike PCMark, each test runs quicker, which favors chips that can clock high in short bursts. So it goes that the 5.4 GHz single-core clock speed of AMD's new baby spanks every other laptop chip we've ever tested, and its sixteen 3D V-Cache-strapped Zen 5 CPU cores dominate—aside from the other chip with 16 Zen 5 CPUs and a massive 256-bit memory bus. This is also far and away the highest single-core result we've ever seen in a laptop.
geekbench ai ryzen 9 9955hx3d performance
Lastly—for today, anyway—we have GeekBench AI results for you. This easy-to-run benchmark compares a platform's AI processing performance across single-precision FP32, half-precision FP16, and quantized INT8 data types. Given that we're focused on the CPU today, these results are all for CPU-based AI processing, with no GPU or NPU assists. Unsurprisingly, the Ryzen 9 9955HX3D comes in just ahead of the Ryzen AI MAX+ 395, thanks to having the same core configuration and slightly higher clock rates. Memory bandwidth is not the bottleneck here, though for very large language models, Ryzen AI MAX's unified memory architecture of up to 96GB will surely pay off as well.
AMD's Zen 5 core architecture excels at AI processing, thanks to its full-width AVX-512 units and AVX-VNNI support, and that shows here in these results. We've also included data when testing with ONNX instead of OpenVINO, though, and it really illustrates how your software configuration can often have much more of an impact than the hardware you're using, when working with AI.
Ryzen 9 9955HX3D Will Have Performance Enthusiasts Stoked For Mobile Firepower - More To Come, So Stay Tuned
msi raider a18 9955x3d and rtx 5090 keyboard
You Can Preorder The MSI Raider A18 HX On Amazon Right Now
Simply put, AMD's Ryzen 9 9955HX3D is a monster of a laptop processor, and MSI's Raider A18 HX offers the necessary skins, power and cooling to push its performance ahead of nearly everything else on the market to date. Of course, one of the biggest areas of benefit for "X3D" processors is in gaming, and you'll notice we haven't presented any gaming benchmarks at all yet. There are other embargos to respect, after all.
Those performance metrics will have to wait for our full review of the platform, coupled with a certain new generation of mobile discrete GPUs in the days ahead. Indeed, this ruthless rig packs another bleeding-edge accelerator inside that we can't dig into just yet. Make sure to check back our full review with gaming benchmarks, as well as more testing and discussion of MSI's new machine and the PC hardware onboard, soon to come.