MSI’s homebrewed version of PBO boosts performance beyond what AMD’s official PBO2 can.
MSI has unveiled a new homebrewed performance-boosting feature called PBO Enhanced Mode. This feature purportedly improves AMD’s Ryzen 9000 chips, which compete with the best CPUs. MSI’s iteration is seemingly an improved version of AMD’s PBO2. The MSI-tuned variant of PBO can boost performance by up to 15% on the Ryzen 7 9700X and up to 10% on the Ryzen 9 9950X.
The new PBO Enhanced Mode from MSI has three modes: PBO Enhanced 1, 2, and 3. In CPU-Z, Cinebench R20, R23, and 2024 — running on a Ryzen 9 9950X, MSI recorded up to a 6% performance improvement with PBO Enhanced 1. Enhanced 2 yielded up to an 8% greater performance improvement, and Enhanced 3 — the most aggressive mode boosted performance to almost 10%. According to MSI’s testing, AMD’s vanilla PBO2 feature only boosted performance by up to 5%.
Similar behavior occurs with the rest of AMD’s existing Ryzen 9000 lineup. The Ryzen 9 9900X was up to 4% faster with AMD’s PBO technology. However, MSI’s Enhanced Mode 3 boosted performance by up to 8%.
The Ryzen 7 9700X was up to 10% faster with PBO2 enabled while enabling MSI’s Enhanced Mode 3 yielded up to a 15% performance gain. Finally, the Ryzen 5 9600X saw an 8% performance improvement with MSI’s PBO Enhanced 3, compared to just a 4% performance improvement with AMD’s PBO2.
MSI also unveiled new temperature-tuned profiles that lower Ryzen 9000’s peak operating temperature without sacrificing much performance. MSI has three temperature profiles: 85C, 75C, and 65C. Internal MSI testing reveals that its 85C profile yields 1% greater performance than stock on a Ryzen 9 9950X while operating at 10C lower temperatures (95C is the default maximum operating temperature for Zen 5 desktop chips).
The 75C profile drops performance by 0.5% compared to stock operation while reducing peak operating temperatures by 20C. Finally, the 65C profile drops performance by 5% while CPU temperatures drop by 30C. Similar behavior was also seen on the Ryzen 9 9900X and Ryzen 7 9700X. However, the Ryzen 5 9600X yielded virtually no performance loss, even on the 65C profile.
MSI does not disclose how it extracted more performance from these homebrewed performance profiles. Still, regardless, MSI’s testing reveals that its homebrewed version of PBO can boost performance beyond what AMD’s official PBO2 technology is capable of. These new modes will only be accessible on MSI AM5 motherboards.