We’ve already witnessed plenty of people rushing out to try and secure the new best gaming CPU on the market, the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D. While finding one hasn’t been an easy task with the processor selling out within minutes on launch day, a week has now passed and we’ve had some time to reflect on the gaming chip’s performance.
Putting it to the test in our 9800X3D review, we ran benchmarks in a few different games at 1080p low settings to see just how much difference the new processor makes; turns out, it’s a lot. Now, it’s time to see if PBO or (Turbo) Game Mode makes any kind of difference; these two features are designed to help improve gaming performance, and our tests back it up.
9800X3D gaming benchmarks with PBO and Game Mode
Utilizing PBO and Game Mode revealed that the biggest gains were in Counter-Strike 2 and Doom Eternal, two games that are already pretty easy to run, the former being designed for the esports crowd which favors high FPS. Our test bench includes the RTX 4070 Ti and 64GB of DDR5-6800 RAM on one of the latest X870E motherboards (ROG Strix X870E-E).
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The chances are, if you’ve got the 9800X3D installed in your rig, you probably don’t have much trouble running CS2 – assuming you have an even half-decent GPU paired with it. Either way, we saw a decent FPS boost from stock to PBO; running Game Mode alongside PBO made a negligible difference. In Doom Eternal, the difference from ‘Stock’ to ‘PBO + Game Mode’ represented an 18.29% performance increase.
For the uninformed, PBO (Precision Boost Overdrive) is a BIOS setting included as part of AMD’s overclocking feature set. It deals with auto voltage and frequency overclocking, allowing CPU cores to boost to a higher speed when there is available thermal and power headroom; this results in higher temperatures. Game Mode (also known as Turbo Game Mode or Game Boost) on the other hand turns off SMT (Simultaneous multithreading), essentially making the 9800X3D just an 8-core CPU, losing the 2 threads per core and optimizing single-threaded performance which comes in handy for certain games – especially older titles.
| Game | Stock | PBO + Game Mode | PBO |
|---|---|---|---|
| Counter-Strike 2 | 601.52 | 662.35 | 666.23 |
| Days Gone | 328.29 | 342.38 | N/A |
| Doom Eternal | 513.22 | 607.09 | 595.2 |
| Horizon Forbidden West | 219.33 | 227.37 | 222.62 |
It’s evident from our tests that games such as Counter-Strike or Doom Eternal lean into the more CPU-intensive category (as much as they can be for lightweight, optimized titles), whereas Days Gone and Horizon Forbidden West are more GPU-bound and only see marginal improvement. It’s also worth noting that as resolution increases, the GPU does more work, so these overclock settings are less impactful at 4K, for example.
Whether you want to toggle PBO and/or Game Mode on or off should be decided on a game-by-game basis, so we think it’s safe to say that these enthusiast settings should be left alone unless you are looking for performance gains in a particular game and don’t mind the temperature rise from overclocking. If you play a variety of games, it’s probably not worth the hassle of diving back into BIOS settings on a regular basis.
- Cores: 8
- Threads: 16
- Boost clock speed: 5.2GHz
- Base clock speed: 4.7GHz
- L3 cache: 96MB
- TDP: 120W
- Platform: AM5
