AMD might give the Ryzen 9600X and 9700X a big post-launch TDP boost in the name of chasing higher performance

Oof, the trials and tribulations the CPU market is facing right now… Between Intel CPU stability issues and mass AMD CPU underwhelm, there might seem to be frighteningly little room for optimism. But the rumour mill keeps on churning, as always, and is now spitting out word of even more potential changes for AMD's mid-range 9000-series chips.

According to tech leaker chi11eddog, the newly released AMD Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 5 9600X will have their TDPs boosted to 105 W. This change is rumoured to be pushed in an AGESA 1.2.0.1a Patch A BIOS update.

Both these Zen 5 CPUs launched with a low 65 W TDP and plenty of reviews noted how power-efficient and thermally light they are. Unfortunately, performance increases over equivalent previous-gen Ryzen CPUs were slight and talk of "Zen 5%" abounded. Given their launch prices being far more expensive than the current pricing of the Ryzen 7000-series chips they're replacing, it's unsurprising they don't seem to be flying off the shelves.

The 9600X and 9700X, as they stand, don't seem like chips offering high-performance improvements. They seem like chips offering efficiency improvements and we in the PC Gamer hardware den aren't the only ones to feel like they've been shipped in eco mode by default, when they could have instead been set to guzzle more power and churn out more frames.

It would make sense, then, if AMD has decided to up their TDPs. For one, we already heard rumour of a TDP increase for the 9700X back in June. And yes, a change now would mean AMD's probably rushed the chip launches before getting everything figured out. But we already kinda knew that, didn't we?

AMD will increase Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X TDP from 65W to 105W, with AGESA 1.2.0.1a Patch A.