Gigabyte is already unable to keep the big promise surrounding the AM5 turbo mode.
AMD will unveil the first Ryzen 9000X3D series CPUs on November 7th, that much is already certain. In the days before this announcement, the motherboard manufacturer Gigabyte leaked that this would be the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, which has already been scheduled several times for this year.
The Gigabyte report made the rounds for a different reason: The manufacturer promised a simple BIOS setting called »X3D Turbo Mode« a »performance increase of up to 35 percent, which is evident in empirical tests«. CPUs without X3D in the name should also benefit from up to 20 percent more performance.
Such a boost via BIOS click is almost unheard of – and remains so, because Gigabyte itself more or less rowed back on this turbo mode in a new announcement video.
The YouTube channel “Aorus Japan”, which is part of Gigabyte’s well-known motherboard brand, recently revealed a new video that goes into more detail about this X3D turbo mode.
Link to YouTube content
In the video shown, Gigabyte explains the requirements. In addition to a mainboard from the manufacturer with the latest BIOS, the function is only intended for Ryzen 9000 and AM5 CPUs with 3D V cache. Theoretically, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D should also benefit from turbo mode.
The other benchmarks that Gigabyte presents are exciting at this point. Here it quickly becomes clear that when you state »up to 35 percent more performance” that “up to” cannot be formatted thick enough.
- In the first presentation slide, Gigabyte shows selected games and their performance gains with turbo mode on the Ryzen 7 9800X3D. The best value: 5 percent in Tomb Raider.
- With the Ryzen 9950X, Gigabyte is at least partially approaching its promise: Far Cry 6 can record an increase of almost 18 percent thanks to the turbo mode.
- Both benchmarks were measured in Full HD.
Now a performance gain via BIOS click is certainly a good thing in itself, regardless of how high it actually is.
In the eyes of the gaming community, the motherboard manufacturer didn’t have to go anywhere near as far with its marketing promise; especially since other manufacturers such as Asus, MSI and Asrock will also have such a mode – the “turbo mode” comes as part of AGESA ComboAM5PI 1.2.0.2 for all AM5 motherboards – and make less full-bodied announcements about them.
Link to Reddit content
The procedure for this turbo mode has also been deciphered. In the Hardwareluxx-Forum User “Iceman021” was able to use the feature on an Asus ROG Crosshair X670E with a BIOS beta version that has the functionality. The following things happen to your processor when you activate this turbo mode:
- SMT (“Simultaneous Multithreading”) is deactivated – with an 8-core CPU there are only 8 threads on board instead of 16 threads.
- Latencies and CCDs are automatically “optimized”.
- For CPUs with two CCDs, one of the two is disabled.
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The latter point in particular raises further questions. With AMD’s chipset drivers, games on previous processors prefer to use the CCD, which has the 3D cache – if the other CCD is deactivated, in principle nothing changes for gaming performance.
Disabling SMT doesn’t necessarily have to be a positive thing either: CPU-intensive games have already shown themselves to have better frame rates on several occasions when multithreading was activated. So whether turbo mode can actually bring a significant improvement in a wide range of games still needs to be proven through objective and independent tests.
