Ryzen 9 7940HS: CPU benchmarks and laptop guide

The AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS was the flagship of the Phoenix generation — an 8-core Zen 4 design from the 2023 Ryzen 7000 line that carried the top badge before Hawk Point renamed it. The catalog matches it to 24 models, and it meets the recommended CPU requirement in 68 of the 69 games the site tracks. This guide covers where the chip sits among laptop CPUs, what it brings to a portable, and which laptops carry it.

Where the Ryzen 9 7940HS sits in 2026

A catalog score of 88 places the chip 21st of 672 scored laptop CPUs — the top few percent of a table that spans two decades of silicon. The neighborhood is a genuine class collision: the Ryzen 5 7645HX (88.2), Core i7-14650HX (88.2) and Core Ultra 5 225H (88) just above, the Ryzen AI 7 350 (87.9) and Core i5-14500HX (87.6) alongside, and the Ryzen 9 8945HS (87.2) just below. Trading blows with HX-class desktop-replacement silicon from a 35 W envelope — and out-pointing its own Hawk Point successor, the 8945HS — is the practical story: near-flagship territory held by the original rather than the refresh.

What the chip brings

Phoenix-HS is an 8-core, 16-thread Zen 4 design built on a 4 nm process and rated at 35 W in its HS-class configuration: a 4.0 GHz base clock and up to 5.2 GHz boost. The integrated Radeon 780M runs at up to 2,800 MHz, which matters for machines shipping without discrete graphics. In public benchmarks the chip posts 2,442 single-core and 11,464 multi-core in Geekbench. Memory support and cache details were not captured for this chip, so the table above sticks to what the catalog verifiably holds.

Games: CPU-side readiness

Measured purely as a processor, the chip clears the recommended CPU tier for 68 of 69 cataloged games — from Baldur's Gate 3, Cyberpunk 2077, Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt at the demanding end through Helldivers 2, Alan Wake 2, The Last of Us Part 1, Returnal and Counter-Strike 2 down to the lightest esports entries. Starfield is the single holdout, listing the chip above its minimum but below its recommended CPU requirement. These verdicts are CPU-only — whether a game actually plays well depends on the laptop's GPU and RAM, and that is where the machines carrying this chip vary most.

Laptops that carry it

The 24-model roster splits between HP's gaming-and-business lineup and ASUS's 2023 fleet. On the HP side: OMEN 16 machines spanning $894 to $1,593, the EliteBook 845 G10 at $582, and the ZBook Power G10 A and ZBook Firefly 14 G10 workstations at $1,126 each. ASUS brings the ROG Flow X13, TUF Gaming A15 and TUF Gaming A17 at $922 each, with the Vivobook 16 at $553 as the accessible entry. Roster medians describe the fleet honestly: office comfort at a perfect 100, a gaming index of 82 and a performance index of 80.8 reflect the discrete-GPU machines, while mobility at 44 and portability at 33.7 keep the fleet carry-friendly by gaming-laptop standards.

Bottom line

The Ryzen 9 7940HS is the thinking buyer's premium pick: 21st of 672, ahead of newer AI-badged silicon in its neighborhood, and spread across a roster that runs from a $553 Vivobook to $1,600-class OMEN machines. Processor-wise it leaves nothing on the table short of Starfield's recommended tier, so spend your comparison time on the GPU and RAM of each listing rather than the CPU badge.