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.

Significant improvements in productivity but no enhancement in gaming performance with the 105W mode on AMD Ryzen 7 9700X & Ryzen 5 9600X CPUs

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.

Related Story AMD Ryzen 7000 Look Far Better Value Than Ryzen 9000 With Latest Price Cuts: Ryzen 9 7950X $410 & Ryzen 7 7700X For $220

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