AMD Motherboard Round Up - Agesa 1.0.0.3ABBA Update

Introduction and Test BIOS

| Source: AMD Price: Author: Tom Logan

Introduction

CPU boosting has been around for a long time now. The ability of a processor to determine when it isn't being fully utilised or has some thermal headroom and therefore can push its clock speed higher to obtain better performance is one that can be enjoyed by anyone who fits their CPU and then gets on with the business of using their processor.

Recently there has been some discussion as to whether the AMD Ryzen CPUs were boosting to the point that they should, and many investigations led to the belief that they hadn't been fully taking advantage of their potential in very specific scenarios. As there has been an update to the code that controls all this, the AMD Generic Encapsulated System Architecture (hereafter AGESA) and some of our benchmarks will benefit from this update, we had to revisit all of the X570 motherboards we've reviewed and update their BIOS and retest the affected benchmarks to make sure our results are up to date for any future tests.

We have a few things to be aware of. Firstly some of our benchmarks - AIDA64, SiSoft Sandra, Realbench, the multicore elements of Cinebench for example - always thrash the processor completely and therefore won't see much change. In the case of the first three on that list, we know for a fact no change will really be seen and so they aren't included here. Sure a different run might see tiny variance but only of the kind you get from any multiple runs of a benchmark. Secondly, the boost clock bonus of the latest AGESA 1.0.0.3ABBA update won't affect the overclocked scores because we're 'overwriting' that boost with our own manual overclock. Primarily the results that will see the biggest increase are stock CPUs on benchmarks that have a separate test for single-threaded performance. Thus it's nice extra performance but shouldn't dramatically change the results or our opinion. This is solely to make sure that all future X570 motherboard reviews aren't unduly benefiting from being run on the latest AGESA rather than the launch BIOS that we used for the majority of our Zen 2 benchmarks.

New BIOS Versions

On the left we have the original BIOS that our motherboards were equipped with, and on the right the new BIOS that we'll be using for our testing today. It's also worth noting that the ASUS Crosshair VIII Impact was already tested on a post-update BIOS and so its scores won't be affected. Otherwise, it's our standard X570 test setup hardware.

Test Setup





AMD Ryzen 9 3900X

G.Skill Trident Z 3600 MHz

Corsair Vengeance RGB 4600 MHz

Corsair MP500 M.2 - OS Drive

Aorus PCIE4 NVME - Storage Speed Tests

Nvidia RTX 2080Ti

Corsair HX1000i

Corsair H150i

Corsair ML Fans

1 - Introduction and Test BIOS 2 - Cinebench R15 3 - Cinebench R20 4 - Geekbench 5 - Blender 6 - Video Encoding 7 - Sony Vegas 8 - Passmark 9 9 - PCMARK 10 10 - 3D Mark 11 - Time Spy Extreme 12 - Gaming 13 - Wrap Up «Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Next»

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