In August, we reported that AMD was planning to increase the TDP of the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X to 105W from 65W. It was speculated that this move came after the new Ryzen 9000 series processor received somewhat underwhelming reviews for their gaming performance.
This increase in TDP will be rolled out with the AGESA 1.2.0.2 BIOS update. With this, users will have the option to switch to the 105W TDP for a performance boost or stick to the 65W for power efficiency. Now that the update is confirmed, benchmarks of the two CPUs – the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X – with 105W TDP have started surfacing online. And from what we have seen so far, there doesn’t seem to be any significant leaps in gaming performance when compared.
Productivity gets a boost, gaming – not so much
A Japanese website, ASCII, published a report that showcased the performance of the two processors. While there seems to be an improvement in productivity performance, not much difference can be seen in gaming performance.
As seen in the graph below, the performance was noted for both CPUs at 65W, 105W, and even 120W for CS2, which is a CPU-intensive game (compared to GPU at least). In the case of the Ryzen 7 9700X, there seems to be insignificant improvement in performance across the three TDPs. And for the Ryzen 9600X, a slight improvement can be seen when the TDP was upped to 105W.
Similarly, for office productivity, there was no significant improvement with the increased TDP. However, the Cinebench 2024 report shows around 10% increase. As demonstrated in the image below, the Ryzen 7 9700X’s multi-core performance goes from 1103 at 65W to 1212 at 105W. The 9600X also shows a slight improvement.
We haven’t had the chance to test the patch ourselves yet, but, overall, it looks like the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X have reached their maximum potential when it comes to gaming. The increased TDP will only benefit users who are looking to boost their productivity performance.
In case you missed it, AMD also rolled out an optimization patch for Windows 11 24H2 and 23H2 to fix the ‘bug’ that prevented the Ryzen CPUs from reaching peak gaming performance. With this optional update, AMD said that the gaming performance of the two processors will be boosted significantly.
