Although the hardware is consistent, there are BIOS tweaks we make depending on the platform. As a broad rule, anything we enable that improves performance is covered under warranty. If performance-enhancing features void the warranty, we leave them disabled. That includes AMD’s Precision Boost Overdrive and Intel’s Extreme power profile. We also don’t enable any motherboard-specific performance enhancements, such as tweaked XMP/EXPO profiles or X3D enhancements.
For this test pool, there are some features still covered by the warranty that improve performance. In Intel’s camp, we tested with Core Ultra 200S Boost enabled on all supported Arrow Lake CPUs (the 225 doesn’t support the feature). Similarly, the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X run at a 65W TDP out of the box, but an optional, warrantied 105W TDP mode is available. We tested with that mode enabled.
We also disabled Virtualization-Based Security (VBS), as it can adversely affect gaming performance.
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Jake Roach Social Links Navigation Senior Analyst, CPUs Jake Roach is the Senior CPU Analyst at Tom’s Hardware, writing reviews, news, and features about the latest consumer and workstation processors.
usertests 7900X3D owners got brutalized in the face (crying while rendering >136 FPS 99% of the time). Reply
Gururu Do we really need power use and efficiency testing for gaming desktops? I am not sure the cost benefits for this application are significant or that there is a wider effort to reduce computing power needs in the face of massive power consumption by the developing AI infrastructure. In other words, does the personal level of power savings at this level actually benefit us or the world? Reply
Roland Of Gilead Nice to see my (New/Old) 5800x3d, is still gaming strong. Still good for a daily gaming driver. Reply
JakeRoach Gururu said: Do we really need power use and efficiency testing for gaming desktops? I am not sure the cost benefits for this application are significant or that there is a wider effort to reduce computing power needs in the face of massive power consumption by the developing AI infrastructure. In other words, does the personal level of power savings at this level actually benefit us or the world? Of course! You could also make the same argument that the difference between 166 FPS and 172 FPS isn't that significant, but you'd still want to know the difference. There's also plenty of downstream considerations between case, cooler, etc. with power. No, I don't think a more efficient CPU benefits the world. It might help out a bit depending on your build, though. 🙂 Reply
hotaru251 I mean not a surprise it runs well on variety of cpu the game isnt open world so RE engine is great on them. (it was made for those type of games) Issue RE engine has is it can't handle large open world games like DD2/MHWilds as it was never intended for those type of games (and why both of them had awful performance) Reply
gggplaya Gururu said: Do we really need power use and efficiency testing for gaming desktops? I am not sure the cost benefits for this application are significant or that there is a wider effort to reduce computing power needs in the face of massive power consumption by the developing AI infrastructure. In other words, does the personal level of power savings at this level actually benefit us or the world? This is very important in countries where electricity costs are very high. Your electric bill is very personal. The 7800x3d looks very good. Reply
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