No Gaming Improvements Seen With AMD Ryzen 9 9700X & Ryzen 5 9600X Running On 105W Mode

Gaming benchmarks show that AMD's Ryzen 5 9600X & Ryzen 7 9700X are better off with 65W mode operation than 105W in gaming.

While AMD is set to release its official AGESA 1.2.0.2 patch for supporting the 105W TDP mode for Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X CPUs, MSI has already prepared experimental AGESA 1.2.0.1 BIOS that enables the 105W mode for both processors. Ryzen 9000 owners are looking forward to this anticipated change, which will supposedly enhance the performance noticeably. This is what we just stumbled upon recently but the impact is rather specific to particular workloads.

The Japanese publication, Ascii.jp published benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X with their TDPs set to 105W to see what kind of performance improvement we can expect from the upcoming patch. The benchmarks were conducted on an ASRock AM5 motherboard by setting the power limit to 105W which can also be done via "Ryzen Master".

The benchmarks contain the results for both CPU-oriented synthetic applications and games. If we look at the gaming benchmarks, we see that there is negligible performance improvement with the new 105W mode. This is true for both Ryzen 9600X and 9700X, which have shown consistently the same results in multiple games.

The tested games were Black Myth: Wukong, Counter-Strike 2, F1 2024, and Starfield. The reviewer benchmarked Ryzen 9600X, 9700X, 7600X, and 7700X on 65W, 105W, and 120W modes to see if the new AGESA patch changes anything. We can see that AMD Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X CPUs offer the same average FPS across all four titles and even the 120W mode for 9700X didn't improve the score even by a bit.

It should be kept in mind that CS2 is a heavily CPU-oriented game and has an FPS limit of up to 1000. The 105W mode did nothing positive for this game and even though the AMD Ryzen 5 9600X improved by 2%, it can be generally taken as a margin of error since the FPS was reaching the mid-500s. What did change drastically was the power consumption, which is the last thing you would want considering there were no improvements.

While the actual power consumption for the AMD Ryzen 5 9600X was almost equivalent on both 65W and 105W modes, the Ryzen 7 9700X was consuming about 18-20W more on the 105W and 120W modes. It looks clear to us that the 9600X and 9700X have maxed out in gaming performance and don't have any further room for improvements with the extended TDP range. Nonetheless, the rumored performance uplift in multi-threaded performance is impacted greatly.

The AMD Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X were able to consume more power in the 105W mode unlike in gaming, where they don't seem to care about the TDP much. In Cinebench 2024, the Ryzen 9700X improved by 10% and the 9600X saw a smaller 3% uplift which is in line with the PBO results AMD had officially shared.

In Handbrake: Encoding, the Ryzen 9700X was able to execute the process 15% faster and the Ryzen 9600X was just 5% faster. In UL Procyon, the difference was rather negligible since the program requires stronger single-core performance. The single-core performance seems not affected by the 105W mode for both CPUs in almost all the tests conducted. A big change was frequencies which were improved a lot with the 105W mode, especially for the 9700X which ran around 4.4-4.5 GHz at default but ended up in the 5 GHz range with the 105W mode but the 120 Watt mode delivered no bump over 105W.

This takes us to the conclusion that AMD Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X CPUs with 105W mode aren't probably what you should go for if you are considering gaming. You would rather be better off with the 65W mode for that case. However, both CPUs do provide some uplift in multi-threaded performance, particularly the 9700X. So if you plan on doing content creation or rendering work, then the 105W mode can be benecifcal for you.

News Source: ascii