AMD has announced that its new Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X CPUs will soon support performance-boosting 105W TDP mode. AMD also says its game-boosting tweaks, which were added to Windows 11 Insider Builds last month, will soon be available to all Windows 11 users.
AMD’s new Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X launched on the market with a 65W TDP cap. Usually, these chips would include 105W TPD and users criticised AMD for capping the performance. The company claimed that the 65W provided a new level of power efficiency to desktop users and the cap had very little impact on gaming.
Newer motherboards, including the recently-reviewed Gigabyte X870 Aorus Elite WiFi 7 and ASUS ROG Crosshair X870E Hero come with the 105W TDP option to bypass the 65W cap on these chips. However, up to now, AMD says that using this setting would void your warranty. The company has now backtracked on this.
The 105W setting is now an “official” feature of the new Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 chips and is covered under warranty. AMD says the chips were designed to run at 105W TDP and if you have the right cooling, your PC should handle it fine.
AMD has also addressed the core-to-core latency on the Zen 5 Ryzen 9 chips compared to older chips. The issue occurs when sharing data between cores located on different chiplets. AMD says this has been fixed in a new BIOS update that cuts the number of transactions in half. AMD commented on the update saying “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.”
The BIOS update should fix bugs across heavily-threaded games. It will also smooth out the 3DMark TimeSpy benchmark test. Games affected by the issue include Starfield, Metro and Borderlands 3 to name a few.
On the DDR5 front, AMD has announced support for DDR5-8000 EXPO memory kits with its new AGESA version. The new RAM could provide a slightly lower latency of 1 to 2ns so it isn’t groundbreaking. However, overclockers and PC enthusiasts will drool over the difference for sure.
We then, of course, have the launch of the new AMD 800 Series boards which are rolling out in the next week or so. These boards include X870 and X870E variants. The new boards make PCI-E 5.0 mandatory for all 800 Series models. The boards also come with USB 4.0 60Gbps interfaces and support AM5 chips.
We reviewed two of the boards which are expected to launch next week. You can watch them down below.
Gigabyte X870 Aorus Elite Wi-Fi 7 (AMD Ryzen 9900X) Review
ASUS ROG Crosshair X870E Hero Motherboard (AMD Ryzen 9900X) Review
