MSI's new BIOS could give AMD Zen 5, yet another performance boost, with a 105W TDP toggle for Ryzen 9600X or 9700X

Can we know how AMD Ryzen CPUs of the 9000 series perform? Every day, it seems there's another rumour or change that affects how we interpret the performance and value these new processors. After learning that a Windows upgrade can improve Zen 3, 4 and 5 gaming performance we now hear that TDP boost mode is here for the Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 processors.

According to a screenshot of a UEFI from X user kuroberu, who claims to have a new MSI BIOS (via Wccftech), the company appears to be adding a 105 W option to its latest releases for the socket Am5 platform. This should allow the 9600X or 9700X, both 65 W chips, to run at a higher TDP of 105 W, improving performance, but also increasing voltages, because where there is power, there is voltage.

While we haven't heard anything from AMD, it appears that MSI will be the first company to include a boost option for AGESA 1.2.0.1a patch A BIOS.

Wccftech reports that this update will be included in the latest AGESA 1.2.0.1 release for MSI boards. Then, AGESA 1.2.0.2 should be released with a BIOS update that will enable the higher TDP mode. Wccftech has been told this will happen in September or October.

If this is already rolling for MSI, then we can expect it to rollout from other board partners as well. This is good news, despite any TDP tweaks, because the latest AGESA update should also fix the AMD Sinkclose flaw, a 18-year-old system flaw that millions AMD CPUs were vulnerable to.

Even if the motherboard vendor makes it easy to change power limits, we still advise caution. Intel was concerned that motherboard vendors were not implementing default power settings. This could have caused stability issues and overvolting.

It is important to note that you can increase these limits at your own peril.

After this warning, I think it makes sense that the TDP option is launched in a future AGESA upgrade. Nick's tests of the two 65W chips showed that they were not very impressive on the performance front but also low on power consumption, so there was plenty of room to increase power to eke out even more performance.

As for how much performance an extra 105 W TDP can give you, koroberu’s X post points to a comparison of a 65 W and 105W 9700X in Cinebench R23’s multi-threaded bench mark that shows a 13% increase.

AMD told Ars Technica, coincidentally, that the latest AMD performance boosting (optional), Windows update could increase performance by up to 13%. It would have been nice if these performance gains were available right away, but as I said in my previous post about the Windows update, you won't hear of me complaining about free performance.