When AMD released their Ryzen 7 9700X CPU back in Aug, there were legitimate concerns with overall output compared to the Ryzen 7 7700X. On paper, pumping 5.5GHz at 65W TDP sounds promising – but there were some mixed results. That configuration wasn’t as stable as AMD hoped for games as a whole; the 9700X was only outperforming its 7700X counterpart of just around 3% – not much of an uplift for a chip that’s higher end. With today’s announcement, AMD is delivering new options for the CPU, which brings hope that it’ll breathe in some new room for promising results.
New Firmware for AMD Socket AM5 platforms
If you have an AMD Socket AM5 motherboard with a Ryzen 600 series chipset, or you
have one of the new AMD 870X motherboards, you will benefit from the new BIOS
firmware spin named AGESA PI 1.2.0.2. Notable updates include warranty support for
higher power levels to squeeze more performance out of the AMD Ryzen 9600X and
9700X processors; and Core-to-Core latency improvements for Ryzen 9 9000-series
desktop processors.
Boost Your Performance with new, Warrantied 105W cTDP for the Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 5 9600X
With a stock Thermal Design Power (TDP) of a low 65 Watts, our vision for the Ryzen
9600X and 9700X was all about efficient performance. But we hear that some of you will
always crave more power and more speed. Well, guess what? With the new 1.2.0.2
BIOS update, you can run your Ryzen 9600X and 9700X at 105W TDP without voiding
your warranty. Just enable the 105W cTDP in the BIOS, and you’re good to go! These
processors have been validated at 105W since their release, so you won’t be pushing
them beyond their design limits. This boost is especially beneficial for multithreaded
workloads, but you might see some gains in less-threaded apps too. Remember, with
great power comes great responsibility: make sure you have an appropriate cooling
solution to handle the higher thermal limit that 105W brings to the table.
Core-to-Core Latency Improvements
Some websites reported an increase in core-to-core latency between the Ryzen 7000
and 9000 series multi-CCD models. This was mainly due to some corner cases where it
takes two transactions to both read, and write, when information is shared across cores
on different parts of a Ryzen 9 9000 processor. However, we’ve been working on
optimizing this since the launch of the 9000 series. In the new 1.2.0.2 BIOS update,
we’ve managed to cut the number of transactions in half for this use case, which help reduce core-to-core latency in multi-CCD models. While this will show up on some core-
to-core latency benchmarks, the real-world improvement is most noticeable in a very specific gaming scenario: in heavily threaded games that don’t trigger core parking. Our
lab tests suggest Metro, Starfield, and Borderlands 3 can show some uplift, as well as
synthetic tests like 3DMark Time Spy.
