AMD's Ryzen 9000 series processors are now available. In general, the power efficiency of this series is noteworthy and deservedly ranks high on our list of best CPUs. mode, and the company has gone a step further by releasing a new motherboard BIOS with what it calls “PBO Extended Mode.

MSI's PBO Enhanced has three modes, named 1, 2, and 3, with mode 3 being the most aggressive; MSI says that with mode 3 enabled, the Ryzen 9 9950X improves nearly 10% in Cinebench R23 multi-threading tests This is by no means a bad result. Not a bad result by any means. [At its default settings, the 65W Ryzen 7 9700X is the most power-constrained chip in the Zen 5 lineup, and freeing it up dramatically improves multithreading performance by 15%. [MSI does not publish single-threaded or gaming results, but performance gains are certain to be smaller, as such workloads typically do not demand continuous full power as long-running multi-threaded workloads do.

Efficiency is a hallmark of Zen 5, and I am a fan of MSI's thermal limit settings; there are three settings that limit the maximum temperature of the chip to 65, 75, or 85 degrees C. According to MSI, setting the 9950X to 85 degrees C does not significantly affect performance and in some cases actually improvement; chips that natively run at lower temperatures, such as the Ryzen 5 9600X, see only a 1% performance drop when set to the 65°C limit.

Setting the 9950X to 65°C lowers temperatures by 30°C, but performance is reported to drop by only 5%. I like these options because they give flexibility in cooler selection and lower noise levels.

Finally, MSI has introduced memory timing presets, useful for those using DDR5-7000+ kits in the 6000 MT/s range, and enabling the more stringent presets improves latency a bit. This will benefit gaming.

It is good to see that end users have the option to tune Ryzen 9000 series systems to their own requirements. We can expect other vendors to follow suit with their own PBO enhancements, but for now, only users with MSI AM5 motherboards will have access to these settings.