MSI has officially rolled out a new feature on its new range of X870 and Z890 motherboards designed for Intel and AMD's new generation of CPUs, and the new feature enables more performance to be squeezed out of onboard NPUs.
The new motherboards for AMD's Ryzen 9000 series and the Intel Core Ultra (Series 2) come with brand-new chipsets that have a range of hardware improvements. To accompany these hardware improvements MSI has overhauled its BIOS interface into what its calling Click BIOS X, and during a recent tour of MSI's motherboard factory in Shenzhen, China, we were able to spend some time with some setups featuring Intel's new Arrow Lake CPUs and the new BIOS interface.
All of MSI's new range of motherboards come with the new BIOS interface, and one of the built-in features is AI Boost. This was a particularly impressive feature as the setting within the BIOS enabled overclocking for the NPU, which MSI claimed to improve AI performance and efficiency by up to 5%. According to MSI, enabling the new feature will provide the user with "faster data processing, enhanced AI performance, improved efficiency in AI tasks, better multi-tasking capabilities, and maximized hardware utilization."
Unfortunately, MSI didn't provide us with any shareable performance charts or explanations of how this feature would be used in real-world use cases, so I suppose we will have to wait until reviewers get their hands on the boards and do the testing themselves. Regardless, it is good to see MSI provide users with the option of overclocking their NPU, and with Intel's upcoming release of Arrow Lake, which features integrated NPUs, users can push their new chips to their absolute peak thanks to MSI.