Gigabyte tests X3D Turbo for CPUs with 35% more performance

Manufacturers repeatedly make promises about their products that they cannot keep. An update announced by Gigabyte last week is supposed to use “BIOS magic” to make AMD’s Ryzen 9000 series over a third faster. Now there is a first test.

X3D Turbo mode on everyone’s lips

Just a week ago, motherboard manufacturer Gigabyte caused a lot of excitement in the gaming and CPU scene. As the company announced in a press release, Agesa 1.2.0.2a would integrate an “X3D Turbo mode” into the BIOS. This would provide a huge performance boost in games with AMD’s new 9000 series processors with and without 3D V cache.

There was talk of up to 35 percent more performance for X3D variants and 20 percent for CPUs without vertical memory. This value is the result of “empirical tests”. Despite all of this, however, it remained completely unclear what kind of adjustment or modification was supposed to bring about these enormous performance boosts. The mainboard manufacturer didn’t say a word about it in its report.

It all sounded too good to be true. And as experience shows in such situations, it usually is. Anyone who looked at Gigabyte’s marketing statements with skepticism and doubt seven days ago will now find themselves confirmed. Because the update is available and a first test of the new turbo mode comes to completely different results.

Disillusionment after the first test

Hardware enthusiast York installed the microcode update and tried it out on his PC. His system consisted of a Ryzen 7 9700X paired with 2x 16 gigabytes of DDR5-6000 RAM. He took Forza Horizon 5 to test it. Like York in one post on his X-profile (via Tom’s Hardware), he was able to observe an increase in performance, but it was well below the 20 percent announced for this type of CPU. The frame rate in the racing game increased from 307 FPS without X3D Turbo to 322 FPS with X3D Turbo.

This corresponds to an increase of around five percent. If you take it seriously, you have to give Gigabyte credit for saying “up to” 20 percent more performance. Nevertheless, this initial result is certainly a disillusionment for many.

Evidence of how it works

As York also writes, the X3D Turbo appears to have disabled SMT and increased the memory bandwidth from 55 GB/s to 61 GB/s. However, it could well be that the mode has additional settings. At least with these two adjustments, five percent more performance seems realistic.

Whether a 35 or 20 percent increase in performance can actually be achieved will soon become apparent as more and more test data emerges in the next few days and weeks. At the moment, however, it seems more like Gigabyte has made a promise that it can’t keep.