AMD Ryzen 9 4900H Review

The Ryzen 9 4900H is one of AMD's enthusiast Laptop processors. It was released in 2020 with 8 cores and 16 threads. With base clock at 3GHz, max speed at 4.4GHz, and a 45W power rating. The Ryzen 9 4900H is based on the Renoir 7nm family and is part of the Ryzen 9 series.

Increased IPC improvements, along with the massive turbo boost of 4.4GHz mean that even in single core performance – long a weak link of AMD’s processors – comes within reaching distance of rival chips.

The AMD Ryzen 9 4900H is an absolute behemoth of a processor, as it absolutely should be with its 8 cores, 16 threads and high price tag. If you’re looking for the absolute best processor money can buy on a mainstream processor, then look no further. Whether you’re playing PC games or even doing hardcore video and 3D work, the AMD Ryzen 9 4900H can handle them with ease.

Over the last couple years, AMD has been reaching for dominance in the desktop CPU world, and with the AMD Ryzen 9 4900H, it's finally there.

The AMD Ryzen 9 4900H, like the rest of AMD's Renoir processors, is built on a 7nm manufacturing node – the smallest in a commercially available CPU. What this means for most people is lower power consumption and much improved performance at the same time.

What this all means is that the AMD Ryzen 9 4900H is an absolute beast when it comes to multi-threaded workloads, especially at this price point. If you're counting on doing some video editing or compiling one hell of an Excel spreadsheet, you're going to see firsthand a performance boost with the Ryzen 9 4900H.

One of the nice things about the AMD Ryzen 9 4900H processors is that the retail boxed models come with a CPU cooler. So, you can pick something like the AMD Ryzen 9 4900H up for $975 and don’t need to spend any extra money on CPU cooling.

The AMD Ryzen 9 4900H retail boxed processor comes with the traditional ‘pancake’ CPU cooler. Nothing fancy, but it gets the job done on this processor which is rated at 45W TDP. You do not need to have an aftermarket cooling solution unless you want to.

Now the biggest question is can AMD’s Ryzen 9 processor play games? The answer is simply yes as it got a respectable gaming score of 83% in our benchmarks.

Regardless of those external factors, the Ryzen 9 4900H proves it has the chops to be your main gaming system and a just as effective media creation platform – two things that are becoming intrinsically connected in this age of live-streaming, eSports and uploading gameplay videos.

The Ryzen 9 4900H clocks up to 4.4Ghz just as it promises on the box, and with AMD’s software you can take one of the cores all the way up to 4.5GHz. However, don’t expect to get much beyond that without seriously upgrading your cooling solution and manually tweaking voltages behind the operating system level.

Although the 45W-rated cooler doesn't feature a copper base or the LEDs found on AMD's higher-end thermal solutions, it does handle Ryzen 9's heat output deftly enough to facilitate XFR-triggered frequencies. This gives you an extra 200 MHz. We were even able to overclock the Ryzen 9 4900H to 4.6 GHz within a reasonable temperature range. The fan also blows down onto the motherboard, which provide additional cooling around the socket. If you need more bling, AMD recently announced that it now offers the LED-equipped cooler separately.