Ryzen 9000 X3D: Gigabyte promises 35% more performance through "BIOS magic"

All the hardware sparrows are now whistling it from the rooftops: The official announcement of AMD's Ryzen 9000 X3D processor series is imminent. The top model, the Ryzen 9800 X3D, with eight cores, sixteen threads and 3D V-Cache for all cores, will once again be the fastest gaming processor. As is so often the case, a single manufacturer could not wait for the launch of the new CPUs.

This week, Gigabyte forged ahead and announced a new function for its motherboards called "X3D Turbo Mode". It is supposed to bring up to 35 percent more speed for Ryzens of the 9000 series with 3D V-Cache, and up to 20 percent for the Granite Ridge CPUs already available without the additional memory. How this is supposed to work was not clear from the announcement (here is the dead link), which can no longer be found on Gigybyte's website. However, Videocardz has published two of the screenshots from the BIOS and the text of the announcement.

The motherboard manufacturer literally writes about its "Gigabyte BIOS wizardry X3D Turbo Mode", in the original the term "wizardry" is used. And indeed, the performance promises border on wizardry, especially because the 3D-V cache of previous X3D Ryzens reacted very sensitively to overclocking and many overclocking functions were disabled immediately. According to unconfirmed information, AMD is to make some overclocking functions accessible again on the X3D Ryzens of the 9000 series.

Marketing from a parallel universe

Programmer Yuri Bubliy, who created some tuning tools for Ryzen processors, says on Platform X that the Gigabyte function is simply a matter of disabling a CCD. "The marketing department lives in a parallel universe," writes Bubliy. The function is only intended for Ryzens with more than one CCD.

Up to now, all desktop Ryzens have consisted of a maximum of two of these "Core Complex Die" chiplets with a maximum of eight cores each. And even without the now advertised Gigabyte feature, it was already possible to switch off one of the chiplets in the BIOS on earlier Ryzens. In theory, the still active CCD can then distribute its heat better across the heatspreader, which allows higher voltages and clock speeds. The latencies when distributing threads to several CCDs are also eliminated.

However, all this also has side effects: Games that are particularly well divided into threads then become slower due to the missing cores, despite slightly higher clock rates. Gigabyte's screenshots also show a system with a Ryzen 5 9600X, which only has one CCD with six cores anyway. So there would simply be nothing to switch off. And the function is also unlikely to be exclusive to this manufacturer, as Gigabyte points out that it was developed together with AMD for the AGESA 1.2.0.2a firmware core.

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