MSI rolls out update giving AMD Ryzen Zen 5 CPUs a free performance boost

AMD Ryzen Zen 5 processors have just received a performance boost on AM5 MSI motherboards as the company has rolled out a fresh BIOS update that implements a new overclocking mode.

The BIOS update was originally spotted by WCCFTech and is the BIOS version AGESA 1.2.0.1, which includes the new performance mode "105W TDP". As you can probably already expect, the new mode increases the total amount of power available to the CPU, which in this case are AMD's mid-range Ryzen 9000 processors - the Ryzen 9700X and Ryzen 9600X. Typically these processors run at 65W, which means this mode increases power usage by 60%, but how much performance does that gain?

The new mode was benchmarked in Cinebench R23, and on the Ryzen 9700X the mult-core score was 23,153, which is quite a step up from the 20,409 score on the 65W mode. The discrepacy between the two scores indicates a performance increase of 13%, but that isn't indicative of every task, or particularly gaming.

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Cinebench R23 is a synthetic benchmark and isn't determinate of real-world testing scenarios such as gaming performance, but with much more power at the CPUs disposal we should see a slight increase across all gaming benchmarks. Notably, AMD won't let motherboard vendors simply drive more power through the CPU to increase average performance above the next price point CPU, as that would canabalize the product stack. This means the Ryzen 9700X will never be faster than Ryzen 9800X, and with this in mind I would predict this BIOS update will give less than 5% or less total performance boost in games.