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

Gigabyte's X3D Turbo mode arrives with the AGESA microcode update 1.2.0.2a , which is already en route to 600 series and 800 series chipset motherboards. According to our sources, the turbo mode isn't exclusive to Gigabyte. Instead, it's a feature that's part of the latest AGESA microcode so that other motherboard manufacturers will offer the same feature, most likely under a different name. It's unknown how the turbo mode works, but we were told it disables a particular setting in the firmware. From the York's feedback, it looks like simultaneous multi-threading (SMT).

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

According to the user's test in Forza Horizon 5 , frame rates went from 307 FPS to 322 FPS with the feature turned on, yielding a 5% performance improvement. This is significantly worse than what Gigabyte touted the feature as capable of, with advertising improvements of up to 20%. To be fair, the vendor did specify "up to." The improvement is probably dependent on the chip, RAM, and motherboard.

In any event, take the testing with a pinch of salt since we don't know if factors were at play that might have hindered the user's benchmark run with the Ryzen 7 9700X. Regardless, a 20% improvement is almost unbelievable purely from a firmware standpoint, but we'll have to wait and see.

We aren't sure what other settings are modified with the turbo mode turned on. A 5% improvement is a more believable and realistic uplift from a motherboard tuning change. Disabling SMT can improve performance slightly in games that don't play nicely with SMT.