These AMD gaming CPUs are getting a huge power boost and faster RAM overclocking

Important performance updates are coming to some AMD gaming CPUs, namely the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X. The big one is an official 105W thermal design power (TDP) mode that should bring a decent speed boost to these chips without losing warranty coverage. AMD is also introducing AMD EXPO support for 8,000MHz DDR5 RAM kits, for faster memory overclocks.

These changes aren’t a total surprise, as an official Ryzen 9700X TDP change was rumored a few months ago. However, this new power increase from 65W to 105W is certainly welcome. With AMD‘s latest 9000 series CPUs struggling to compete against its own superb 7000 series X3D CPUs, such as the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, this gives AMD’s latest chips a renewed chance of earning a spot on  our best gaming CPU guide.

While it was possible to unlock a higher TDP for these Zen 5 CPUs on some motherboards, it wasn’t officially supported, and it risked voiding your warranty if something went wrong. With this update, AMD is allowing overclockers to switch to a 105W TDP without voiding their warranty in the process. Still, if you use this mode, AMD recommends that you have appropriate cooling to handle the higher thermal limits.

Although we haven’t tested this out, data from MSI’s unofficial 105W TDP change points to a 9700X performance increase of around 13% in multi-core testing, while AMD’s own data suggests around 10%. AMD claims that the TDP change will be “especially beneficial for multithreaded workloads” on your PC, which makes sense as the higher TDP is all about allowing the chip to push to a higher thermal and power load, which tends to only increase significantly with multi-threaded workloads.

Because of this emphasis on multi-threaded performance, with only modest gains for single-threaded workloads, this update won’t revolutionize the performance of most games. However, but it could improve frame rate stability in CPU-hungry modern games where multithreading is important, such as Cities Skylines 2.

These updates form part of AMD’s AGESA PI 1.2.0.2 BIOS update, which also includes an improvement to core-to-core latency; the time it takes for the CPU to transfer data between individual CPU cores. Initial performance for the Ryzen 9000 series showed an increase in latency compared to the Ryzen 7000 series CPUs, which this update should address. This update is already rolling out to motherboard manufacturers, but you’ll need to flash your BIOS to apply it.

Alongside the 105W TDP increase and core latency improvements, AMD is also introducing AMD EXPO support for DDR5-8000 memory kits with the release of its new X870 and X870E motherboards. AMD EXPO unlocks one-click overclocking in the BIOS, allowing you to run your RAM at its maximum frequency and latency timings.

Until now, the best gaming RAM only included EXPO support for modules that have a frequency of 6,000MHz, like the Corsair Vengeance RGB DDR5. AMD says that DDR5-6000 is still the “sweet spot” for most users, however.

These changes may offer modest game frame rate improvements for these Ryzen 9000 series CPUs, but if you’re looking for a bigger boost, you might want to pick up a new graphics card. Our best graphics card guide has a number of recommendations that would really help to raise your frame rates across the board.