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A hardware enthusiast tested Gigabyte X3D Turbo Mod. As shared by York on the X, the model was tested in Forza Horizon 5 on a Ryzen 7 9700X. With the feature enabled, performance improved by 5%.

Gigabyte’s X3D Turbo mod comes with AGESA microcode update 1.2.0.2awhich is already on its way to motherboards with 600-series and 800-series chipsets. According to our sources, turbo mode is not exclusive to Gigabyte. Instead, it is a feature that is part of the latest AGESA microcode, so other motherboard manufacturers will offer the same feature, most likely under a different name. It’s not known how turbo mode works, but we’re told it disables a certain setting in the firmware. From York’s feedback, it appears to be simultaneous multi-threading (SMT).

Gigabyte’s new mod was tested with the Ryzen 7 9700X paired with two 8GB DDR5-6000 DDR5 memory modules. Enabling Gigabyte’s X3D turbo mode disabled SMT and increased memory bandwidth from 55GB/s to 61GB/s.

According to user test in Forza Horizon 5frame rates went from 307 FPS to 322 FPS with the feature enabled, achieving a 5% performance improvement. This is significantly worse than what Gigabyte claimed the feature was capable of, with advertised improvements of up to 20%. To be fair, the seller specified “until”. The improvement probably depends on the chip, RAM and motherboard.

In any case, take the testing with a pinch of salt, as we don’t know if there were any factors that could have hindered the user’s benchmark run with the Ryzen 7 9700X. Regardless, a 20% improvement is almost unbelievable from a firmware standpoint alone, but we’ll have to wait and see.

We’re not sure what other settings are changed with turbo mode on. A 5% improvement is a more believable and realistic increase from a motherboard tuning change. Disabling SMT can slightly improve performance in games that don’t play well with SMT.