ASUS ROG Flow X3 Laptop Blitzes Benchmarks With AMD Ryzen 9 5980HS Zen 3 CPU

ASUS ROG Flow X13
This is shaping up to be an exiting year in PC hardware (pending sufficient inventory levels). At CES 2021 last week, AMD formally introduced its Ryzen 5000 series of mobile processors, most of which are based on Zen 3 (a few are Zen 2 parts). Likewise, AMD's hardware partners announced upcoming laptops based on its newest CPU stack. One of those is the ASUS ROG Flow X13, which has found its way onto Geekbench outfitted with a Ryzen 9 5980HS.

Among its mobile peers, the Ryzen 9 5980HS sits second from the top, only behind the Ryzen 9 5980HX. It sports an 8-core/16-thread design, with a 3.0GHz base clock and 4.8GHz boost clock, along with 20MB of L3 cache and a 35W TDP. Here is a look at the complete lineup...

AMD Ryzen 5000 Series Mobile
Click to Enlarge

The Ryzen 9 5980HX essentially offers a bump in the base clock, with a higher TDP (45W+) to get there. In fact, there is not a lot of separation among all four Ryzen 9 SKUs, in terms of their clockspeeds. As for the U-series lineup, note that the Ryzen 7 5700U, Ryzen 5 5500U, and Ryzen 3 5300U are based on Zen 2, whereas every other SKU is built around Zen 3.

As for the ROG Flow X13, it is a 2-in-1 convertible aimed at gamers. It comes with a few different processor options, as well as 16GB or 32GB of RAM. For graphics, a GeForce GTX 1650 is standard, though ASUS plans to sell an ROG XG Mobile external graphics enclosure with a GeForce RTX 3080.

Let's have a look at the Geekbench listing...

ASUS ROG Flow X13 at Geekbench
Source: Geekbench

Oddly enough, the listing identifies the Ryzen 9 5980HS as having a 3.3GHz base clock instead of 3.0GHz, and a 4.53GHz boost clock instead of 4.8GHz. It could be an early engineering sample, or a mis-reading by Geekbench, or something else (perhaps the average speed it was able to maintain).

In any event, it scored 1,532 in the single-core test and 8,219 in the multi-core test. How does that compare to the previous generation? One of the more recent entries for a laptop with a Ryzen 9 4900HS has it scoring 1,235 in the single-core test and 8,107 in the multi-core test. So based on that particular comparison, the Ryzen 9 5980HS scored 24 percent higher in the single-core benchmark run, and roughly the same in the multi-core test.

Benchmark results at Geekbench are scattered all over the place, though, so it's always tricky comparing different entries, especially when it comes to leaks. That said, the single-core test result is certainly encouraging.