Never fear … a fix is here!
AMD’s unreleased firmware, which the company says will fix the boost behavior of its Ryzen 3000 processors, has leaked onto the Chiphell forums. We grabbed the download and did a round of testing to see if the new BIOS and SMU fix the boosting behavior of the Ryzen 9 3900X and Ryzen 7 3700X processors.
We have to caution, however, that this is a leaked beta BIOS revision that may not be in its final state, so we’ll have to take the results with a grain of salt. In either case, we do see some improvements that fall in line with our expectations for the Ryzen 7 3700X, but we also spotted an odd performance regression with the Ryzen 9 3900X, indicating this firmware is a work in progress.
AMD’s Ryzen 3000 series processors landed two months ago, bringing a new level of performance and value for the mainstream desktop as the company took the lead in the race to the leading-edge 7nm node, the first time in its history that it had managed to beat Intel to a denser manufacturing process. But the company’s triumphant moment has been marred by persistent reports that the chips aren’t achieving their rated boosts speeds, an issue thrust into the spotlight by a recent survey conducted by YouTuber Der8auer in which a surprising number of respondents reported they weren’t reaching their rated boost clocks.
That was followed by Intel citing a report that claims reliability is behind AMD’s apparent, but not proven, reasons for reducing its chips’ frequencies.
AMD announced this week that it had identified an issue with its firmware that reduces performance in some situations and that it would update the community on an incoming fix on September 10.
Sources: Tom’s Hardware
