AMD Ryzen 9 4900U Review

The Ryzen 9 4900U is one of AMD's enthusiast-low-power Laptop processors. It was released in 2020 with 8 cores and 16 threads. With base clock at 2GHz, max speed at 4.4GHz, and a 15W power rating. The Ryzen 9 4900U 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 4900U, 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 4900U 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 4900U.

The AMD Ryzen 9 4900U is another impressive release from AMD and its 1 Generation of Ryzen 9 chips. With it, you’re getting 8-cores and 16-threads, with a boost clock of 4.4GHz. It may not be the strongest contender ever made on paper, but when you see and feel the actual performance gains it offers, you’re certainly getting a lot of bang for your $282.74 buck.

One of the nice things about the AMD Ryzen 9 4900U processors is that the retail boxed models come with a CPU cooler. So, you can pick something like the AMD Ryzen 9 4900U up for $282.74 and don’t need to spend any extra money on CPU cooling.

The AMD Ryzen 9 4900U 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 15W TDP. You do not need to have an aftermarket cooling solution unless you want to.

Ryzen 9 hasn’t had the smoothest entrance into the computing world with lackluster gaming and some CPU temperatures high enough to raise concerns. But after a month of optimizations plus new drivers and BIOS updates, Ryzen 9 seems to have bypassed those same growing pains.

The Ryzen 9 4900U 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 15W-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 4900U 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.