Test with Gigabyte’s X3D Turbo mode shows 5% gain in performance

Home tests with the new X3D Turbo mode on a Gigabyte motherboard showed results that were far from the manufacturer’s promises in terms of performance gains. While the owner of Aorus cards speaks of increases of up to 20% in game framerate, a test with Forza Horizon 5 shows gains of just 5%.

Of course, it is important to make several observations before passing any judgment. The test in question is being circulated on Twitter, but we do not have details about the settings and conditions under which it was carried out. Therefore, it is not possible to know whether optimizations would be possible to offer better results.

We do know, however, the hardware used in the test. We have a Ryzen 7 9700X processor with two 8GB DDR5 memory modules. It’s worth remembering that Gigabyte promises improvements of up to 20% on processors without 3D V-Cache, like the one used in the test. For Ryzen processors with X3D, the numbers would reach up to 35%.

As the images show, Forza Horizon 5’s frames per second count in the test rose from 307fps to 322fps with the feature enabled.

How does Gigabyte X3D Turbo work?

We still don’t have details on how the feature works, but Tom’s Hardware speculates that the X3D Turbo mode has much more to do with the AGESA microcode than with Gigabyte cards.

Site sources explain that the feature is part of the AGESA 1.2.0.2a update and that other motherboard manufacturers will probably soon give their own names to the technology as well. Apparently, what the feature does is disable SMT and boost memory bandwidth.

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Thus, games that do not use SMT well can show better performance gains than just 5%. With the feature arriving this week, more tests should appear soon.