The upcoming flagship for Zen 4 CPUs, AMD's Ryzen 9 7950X, has been seen rising up to 5.85GHz, but there are certain restrictions to be aware of.
The latest Zen 4 leak was reported by HXL on Twitter, a frequent source of hardware leaks, and VideoCardz(opens in new tab) highlighted the tweet. This latest Zen 4 leak comes from a Weibo(opens in new tab) user (a social media platform in China), so it should be treated with more caution than usual.
As you can see, the leaker claims to have a Ryzen 9 7950X that operates at 5.85GHz as stated - enormous amounts of salt are obviously necessary, and we'll talk more about what that speed means later - whereas Intel's Raptor Lake flagship is said to operate at a top speed of 5.8GHz.
The pre-release 7950X's CPU-Z screenshot shows a speed of 5.85GHz, which is consistent with the top speed previously suggested for the Zen 4 flagship by Angstronomics (a reliable source).
No matter how you slice it, the 7950X looks quite good.
Although we should clearly be quite suspicious about this claim, the fact that the 7950X is capable of such a bump is undoubtedly fairly surprising. The leaker now claims that the Ryzen CPU can actually be overclocked to 5.7GHz, with 5.85GHz being recorded by PBO (Precision Boost Overdrive – in other words, the automated overclocking mode you can switch on to get a bit more performance out of your chip).
However, as another well-known Twitter leaker (Uzzi38(opens in new tab)) points out, what's actually occurring with this sample 7950X is that it is hitting 5.85GHz without the need for a PBO, but this is only a peak frequency that was likely only attained occasionally and for a short period of time. In other words, the flagship Zen 4 chip's stated maximum increase will be less than this (more like the mentioned 5.7GHz).
For obvious reasons, AMD will have an official (default) max boost set at a suitably low level so all chips can dependably hit it. However, exact speeds will depend on the quality of the processor you purchase as there is always some variation between CPU models.
Whatever the case may be for the Ryzen 9 7950X's precise top boost speed, it appears that it will be quite close to the Raptor Lake champion, the Core i9-13900K. This is yet another indication that the conflict between Zen 4 and Intel's 13th-gen silicon will be extremely close.
The AMD introduction event for the next-generation chips is taking place tomorrow via a livestream, so we'll learn a lot more about the Ryzen 7000 then. At this occasion, there's a strong chance we'll learn the flagship 7950X's official rated boost speed.
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