Ryzen 9 8940HX: CPU benchmarks and laptop guide

The AMD Ryzen 9 8940HX is Dragon Range silicon — 16 cores and 32 threads aimed at 2025's flagship gaming laptops. Ten catalog laptops carry it, spanning 2024 through 2026 models, and as a processor it clears the recommended CPU tier in 58 of the 69 games the catalog tracks. This guide covers where the chip sits among laptop CPUs, what it brings, and which machines were built around it.

Where the Ryzen 9 8940HX sits in 2026

A catalog score of 70.9 places the chip 81st of 741 scored laptop CPUs — the top ninth of the table. The neighborhood: the Ryzen 5 7535HS (71.7), Ryzen 9 9850HX (71.5) and Ryzen 7 5800U (71.1) just above, the Core Ultra 7 255HX (70.4), Ryzen 5 6600U (70.1) and Ryzen 5 7535U (70) just below. The company it keeps cuts across classes — a thin-and-light Ryzen 7 5800U on one side, Intel's HX workstation silicon on the other — but the 8940HX belongs firmly in the desktop-replacement tier, and only the very top of the ranking escapes it.

What the chip brings

Dragon Range is a 16-core, 32-thread design on a 5 nm process, rated at 55 W in its HX configuration: a 2.4 GHz base clock that boosts to 5.3 GHz. The integrated GPU is a Radeon 780M — genuinely useful RDNA 3 graphics that no laptop in this roster will ever lean on, because every machine here pairs the chip with high-end discrete GPUs. Public records show a 50,089 PassMark overall score; memory configuration 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 meets the recommended CPU tier for 58 of 69 cataloged games — Alan Wake 2, Counter-Strike 2, Star Wars Jedi Survivor, Resident Evil 4 Remake, Black Myth Wukong, Ghost of Tsushima and Metro Exodus among them. The remaining 11 — Starfield, Helldivers 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur's Gate 3, Elden Ring and Fortnite included — sit at the minimum tier, and no tracked game falls below its reach. These verdicts are CPU-only; actual playability depends on the laptop's GPU and RAM, and in this roster that hardware is rarely the limiter.

Laptops that carry it

The 10-model roster is almost entirely 2024–2026 gaming hardware: ASUS TUF Gaming A16 and A18, ROG Strix G16 and G18, MSI's Crosshair A16 HX AI and Vector A16 HX, the Lenovo Legion Pro 5 Gen 10, Gigabyte's Aorus Master 16 and HP's Omen 16 — with Lenovo's ThinkBook 16p Gen 6 as the lone business entry. Prices run $1,144–$1,800. Laptops built around it typically show a median gaming index of 89, a best CPU score near 83, engineering and modeling indices at 81, office comfort at a perfect 100 and energy efficiency at 91.7 — against a portability median of just 23. Serious machines, seriously heavy.

Bottom line

The Ryzen 9 8940HX is a no-compromise processor for buyers who want the CPU to disappear as a concern: 58 recommended-tier clears, zero games beyond its minimum reach, and 16 cores that make it equally credible for rendering, code builds and streaming alongside gaming. The surrounding roster — $1,144 to $1,800 of 2024–2026 gaming hardware — matches the chip's intent, though the portability numbers confirm these are desk machines first. Anyone shopping this tier should compare within the neighborhood: the Ryzen 9 9850HX just above or Intel's Core Ultra 7 255HX just below are the natural cross-shops.