AMD is making its new Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X faster, and you don’t need to do anything special to see a performance boost. Although relatively disappointing out of the gate, AMD’s budget CPUs could rank among the best processors thanks to a string of new BIOS updates that should allow the chips to hit higher peak performance.
All of the major motherboard vendors have now released a 105-watt mode for these two CPUs. MSI first released this update, but now Asus and Gigabyte have followed suit. The new power mode comes from AGESA 1.2.0.1a, and it’s available for most 600-series motherboards now. If your motherboard doesn’t have an update yet, you should see it sometime in September.
Gigabyte claims that the new power mode can result in a 13% performance jump in Cinebench R23, which shouldn’t come as a surprise. Both the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X come with a default Thermal Design Power (TDP) of 65W. Prior to releasing, some speculated AMD would increase the power of the Ryzen 7 9700X to keep it competitive with AMD’s own Ryzen 7 7800X3D. The default value isn’t changing, but this new power mode lends some credibility to those claims.
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The higher power mode should result in a performance increase, but it’s worth pointing out that it doesn’t fall within AMD’s official specifications. Pushing a higher power limit is a bad idea if you don’t have adequate cooling, so make sure to check out our list of the best CPU coolers if you want to enable the new power mode.
In addition, some applications may see less of a performance boost. In games, for example, the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X aren’t always pushed to their limits, and that’s particularly true in graphically demanding games like the recent Black Myth: Wukong. Games that stress the CPU more should see a performance bump, however, such as Hitman 3 and Cyberpunk 2077.
We haven’t seen BIOS updates from smaller motherboard vendors, but they should roll out with the new AGESA version soon. Although it can be intimidating to update your BIOS for newcomers, the process is fairly straightforward these days. Our guide on what a BIOS is has everything you need to get started, from navigating the BIOS menu to upgrading to a new version.
The BIOS update should help performance, but AMD has boosted the performance of its new Zen 5 CPUs in other areas, too. The latest Windows 11 update, for example, can increase performance by a further 10% due to a better branch prediction implementation.
