Is the AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS good for gaming?
Is the AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS good for gaming?
Powerful AMD notebook processor
The Ryzen 9 4900HS is a powerful yet efficient notebook CPU from AMD. Like the impressive Ryzen 9 desktop-class processors, this CPU is excellent at most tasks you'll perform on a laptop. And because this CPU is from AMD's Ryzen 4000-series of mobile processors, it's built on a 7nm process with a thermal design power (TDP) of 35W.
Found in the best AMD Ryzen laptops, the Ryzen 9 4900HS sits near the top of the H-series options, has eight cores and 16 threads. It can handle a heavy load, whether you're gaming or working with specialized design software. These processors aren't quite as powerful as the desktop counterparts, but you're getting incredible levels of computing performance for the power.
As well as the CPU itself, the Ryzen 9 4900HS comes with AMD's Radeon Vega GPU. It's better than what Intel offers with the UHD series, though compared to dedicated graphics processing, the processor will struggle with more demanding games if it's all alone. So long as you're looking at notebooks with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti or above, you'll be good to go.
Against the competition
Comparing Intel and AMD here would be the AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS and Intel Core i9-10855H.
Header Cell - Column 0 | AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS | Intel Core i9-10885H |
---|---|---|
Cores | 8 | 8 |
Threads | 16 | 16 |
Base clock | 3.0GHz | 2.4GHz |
Boost clock | 4.3GHz | 5.3GHz |
Cache | 12MB | 16MB |
GPU | Vega 8 | Intel UHD |
Process | 7nm | 14nm |
TDP | 35W | 45W |
Overclocking | No | No |
Intel used to have a stronghold on the mobile market for processors, and even the 3000 series from AMD struggled to make any progress. The 4000 series is a whole different game, however.
CPU | Single core | Multi core |
---|---|---|
AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS | 1,221 | 7,982 |
Intel Core i9-10885H | 1,321 | 7,671 |
The integrated GPU is vastly more powerful than what's offered by Intel, but you won't be playing any demanding games at high frame rates. It does mean you don't have to use the dedicated GPU for all tasks, like watching videos, which can help save some battery life.
Impressive Gaming Performance
The ASUS ROG Zephyrus G15 is seriously impressive. It has an eight-core AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS processor, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, as well as an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 Max-Q dedicated GPU. The 15.6-inch 240Hz display will ensure your PC games look excellent.
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Rich Edmonds was formerly a Senior Editor of PC hardware at Windows Central, covering everything related to PC components and NAS. He's been involved in technology for more than a decade and knows a thing or two about the magic inside a PC chassis. You can follow him on Twitter at @RichEdmonds.