Unlike the Ryzen 8000 Hawk Point laptop APUs, the Ryzen 9 7940HX had a more subdued launch. It was not prominently featured but rather discovered in a spec sheet for the upcoming Asus TUF Gaming A16 variant, available in China. Recently, this SKU has been benchmarked alongside the ASUS Tianxuan 5 Pro by Bilibili creator "Wheat Milk Mitsu" (machine translated).
In essence, the Ryzen 9 7940HX can be considered as an underclocked variant of the Ryzen 9 7945HX. It features 16 cores and 32 threads, with a slightly reduced boost clock of 5.2 GHz. Despite the modest clock reduction, its performance remains quite competitive, achieving scores of 1,882 and 33,284 points in Cinebench R23's single and multi-core tests. These results are slightly slower (1,948 single-core, 34,630 multi-core) compared to the fastest Ryzen 9 7945HX sample found in the Alienware m18 R1 AMD Edition.
In terms of gaming performance, there were notable differences. In CPU-bound titles like Counter-Strike 2 at 1080p, the Ryzen 9 7940HX achieved 308 FPS, trailing behind the Ryzen 9 7945HX at 378 FPS. The performance gap widened at 1440p. Both configurations utilized a GeForce RTX 4070 GPU, though variations in cooling solutions may exist. The power consumption stabilized around 120 Watts, and the clock speeds settled just below 5.0 GHz, slightly below the advertised levels.
In general, only a select group of gamers engaged in CPU-bound FPS titles might discern the variance between a Ryzen 9 7940HX and a Ryzen 9 7945HX. Apart from that, the two chips are nearly identical, raising questions about the necessity of launching the xx40 variant and its alignment with AMD's own naming conventions. Fortunately, it appears that this CPU won't be exclusive to China and will be available globally.