Announced quietly and spotted across a wave of gaming laptops, the Ryzen 7 8745HX, Ryzen 7 8840HX, Ryzen 9 8940HX, and Ryzen 9 8945HX are essentially warmed-over versions of last year’s 7000HX models.
Built on the same Zen 4 architecture, these chips share almost every spec with their predecessors. The one real difference is a 100 MHz bump on the 8940HX’s boost clock.
For those unfamiliar with the HX badge, this line is AMD’s attempt to wedge desktop-class grunt into laptops. These aren’t the whisper-quiet chips found in ultrabooks. They’re big, hot, and hungry—rated up to 75W TDP—with boost clocks pushing the mid-5 GHz mark. They come packed with plenty of cache: the Ryzen 9s boast 80MB, while the 8840HX and 8745HX offer 76MB and 40MB respectively.
All four chips come with Radeon 610M graphics based on RDNA 2, but let’s not kid ourselves—no one’s buying these for integrated GPU grunt. They’ll be paired with Nvidia’s new RTX 50-series cards in thick, power-gobbling gaming rigs. Think more “lug it around” than “slip it into your backpack.”
Spec-for-spec, it breaks down like this:
– Ryzen 9 8945HX: 16 cores, 32 threads, 5.4GHz boost, 80MB cache
– Ryzen 9 8940HX: 16 cores, 32 threads, 5.3GHz boost, 80MB cache
– Ryzen 7 8840HX: 12 cores, 24 threads, 5.1GHz boost, 76MB cache
– Ryzen 7 8745HX: 8 cores, 16 threads, 5.1GHz boost, 40MB cache
All of this is nice on paper, but without meaningful changes under the hood, buyers should keep expectations in check. AMD’s own promises of “ultra-fast gameplay” and “solid performance” sound fine, but these chips look like they were yanked out of a 2023 product brief and slapped with new stickers.
If you spot a laptop packing a Ryzen 7000HX, don’t panic—you’re not missing out. Unless the pricing on these new chips undercuts the old ones significantly, the so-called refresh doesn’t move the needle.
What does matter is what’s coming next. AMD’s Fire Range, built on actual next-gen Zen 5 architecture, is waiting in the wings. The Ryzen 9 9955HX3D, with its dollop of 3D V-Cache, was already announced at CES and is due before the middle of the year. If you’re holding out for a real leap forward—something that might justify the price of a new gaming laptop—that’s where the action will be.
