AMD is purportedly preparing to raise the TDP for the Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 5 9600X, which rival the best CPUs on the market. According to hardware leaker Chi11eddog on X, an upcoming AGESA 1.2.0.1a Patch A update will reportedly increase the TDP of the two Zen 5 chips from 65W to 105W. Since it's a rumor, take the information with a big grain of salt.
Assuming the rumor has some belief, the increased TDP for the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X suggests AMD wants to improve both CPU's multi-core performance to increase their competitiveness against Intel's outgoing 14th Gen Raptor Lake Refresh CPUs and prepare against the forthcoming Arrow Lake army.
With Zen 5, many considered a significant "regression" on AMD's part to reduce the TDP of the Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 SKUs. For instance, the older Ryzen 5 7600X and Ryzen 7 7700X featured TDPs of 105W. However, for the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X, AMD decided to reduce the TDP of both chips to 65W — capping them to the AMD's conventional non-X SKUs, such as the Ryzen 5 7600, Ryzen 7 7700, and Ryzen 9 7900 non-X parts.
The 65W TDP does hinder the Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 5 9600X's multi-threaded performance. For example, in Cinebench 2024, we discovered that the 9700X performed 13% faster in the multi-threaded benchmark when we enabled Precision Boost Overdrive. This feature unlocks the CPU power limits and effectively allows the CPU to consume as much power as it wants when set to its maximum limits.
Without PBO, we discovered that the Ryzen 7 9700X performs very similarly to its predecessor in most tasks, including multi-threaded performance. In our multi-threaded performance ranking, the 9700X was 7% faster than the 7700X. However, with PBO, that margin increased significantly to 22% in favor of the 9700X.
Increasing the 9600X and 9700X TDP to 105W would improve both CPUs' multi-core performance (albeit not by 22%), enabling both chips to be more competitive. The increased TDP would also match the older Ryzen 5 7600X and Ryzen 7 7700X, making them more similar to their predecessors without any numerical regressions on the spec sheet.
