Is the AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS good for gaming?

AMD Ryzen
AMD Ryzen

AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS

Source: AMD (Image credit: Source: AMD)

Is the AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS good for gaming?

Best answer: AMD's Ryzen 9 4900HS processor is brilliant for gaming and creativity on notebooks. Powered by eight physical cores and 16 threads, you've got ample performance here for either task.

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.

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Header Cell - Column 0 AMD Ryzen 9 4900HSIntel Core i9-10885H
Cores88
Threads1616
Base clock3.0GHz2.4GHz
Boost clock4.3GHz5.3GHz
Cache12MB16MB
GPUVega 8Intel UHD
Process7nm14nm
TDP35W45W
OverclockingNoNo

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.

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CPUSingle coreMulti core
AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS1,2217,982
Intel Core i9-10885H1,3217,671

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.

Rich Edmonds
Senior Editor, PC Build

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.