After a brief delay, AMD has begun to roll out its Ryzen 9000 CPUs. Originally meant to go on sale on July 31, the processors began arriving in the market this month.
The Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 5 9600X launched on August 8, while the Ryzen 9 9900X and Ryzen 9 9950X will go on sale on August 15.
AMD has added a feature called Optimized Performance Profile (OPP), which lets you overclock your RAM.
If you have both a Ryzen 9000 CPU, such as the Ryzen 7 9700X, and an MSI motherboard, a new BIOS update can help you improve the gaming performance of your CPU by up to 21 per cent, according to Digital Trends.
This is reportedly due to MSI’s own stack of features, which now includes MSI Memory Try It and High-Efficiency Mode.
MSI shared some benchmarks highlighting the improvements you can get from each feature.
You can mix and match features such as AMD OPP and MSI’s High-Efficiency Mode, or combine the two MSI options into one overclocking tool.
For the test, MSI used a PC with a Ryzen 7 9700X CPU, the MSI MAG X670E Tomahawk Wi-Fi motherboard, and two different types of memory: Galax’s HOF Pro DDR5-7200 and Kingston’s Fury Beast DDR5-6000.
The AMD OPP can only be used with memory modules with SK Hynix chips. Using OPP, MSI overclocked the memory to a DDR5-6000 CL30-38-38-96 profile and compared it to a default of DDR5-4800.
This decreased latency by 19 per cent compared to the default profile and around 5 per cent better than using AMD Expo. Gaming performance boosts varied depending on the title, ranging from a 2 per cent increase up to 13 per cent at 1080p.
Next, MSI also combined AMD OPP with its own High-Efficiency Mode, available in four presets: Tightest, Tighter, Balance, and Relax.
MSI paired OPP with the second-best mode, Tighter, and found that this combination reduced latency by an additional 8 per cent compared to using OPP alone. Gaming gains ranged from 2-8 per cent.
Finally, MSI dropped OPP in favour of its own Memory Try It feature, which supports memory modules from vendors including Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron.
MSI used the DDR50-600 CL28-35-35-60 setting and paired it with the Tighter preset from the High-Efficiency Mode. This combo delivered an up to 10 per cent uplift compared to using AMD OPP alone, a 13 per cent boost compared to using Expo, and an up to 21 per cent 1080p gaming boost versus a setup that wasn’t overclocked.
For those eager to try these combinations at home, MSI shared a warning in its blog post: Overclocking your RAM may cause system instability, so proceed with caution and don’t go all-in all at once.
