I've tested Asus' new Turbo Game Mode for AMD CPUs and my verdict is simple: Don't use it

pcgamer.com:

We live in some strange times. Let's say you've splashed the cash and bought yourself a brand new Ryzen 9 9950X processor. It's got 16 cores, 32 threads and it's a seriously capable CPU, though not the absolute best for gaming. Well, Asus reckons it has a fix for the latter in the form of a new Turbo Game Mode, that halves the number of cores and quarters the number of threads.

Specifically, what Turbo Game Mode (TGM) does is disable one of the CCDs (Core Complex Dies) and SMT (Simultaneous Multithreading). In short, it turns the likes of the 9950X into an 8-core, 8-thread processor. The idea is that some games just don't like to have threads scattered across separate dies or sharing any cores.

To see if this is the case for any of the games in our CPU benchmarking suite, I ran them afresh with the beta 2505 BIOS for the Asus ROG Crosshair X670E Hero motherboard. The test setup used a Ryzen 9 9950X, 32 GB of DDR5-6000 CL28, a GeForce RTX 4070, and Windows 23H2.

You can see the results for yourself below but as a quick summary, Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur's Gate 3 ran worse with TGM enabled, Metro Exodus and Total War: Warhammer 3 ran exactly the same as without it, and Homeworld 3 and Factorio ran better with it on.

A mixed bag but when Homeworld 3 only ran 2% better on average, and Factorio 5% quicker, it raises a simple question: Is it worth using it at all?

One thing worth considering is that this is a BIOS option and not something that you can flick on and off while in Windows. TGM absolutely ruins the CPU's content creation capabilities so it's not a setting that you'd ever use in that situation.

And unless you only play a specific collection of games, where TGM does help, you'd get pretty annoyed having to reboot your PC every time you wanted to play something different.

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When I first reviewed AMD's dual CCD Zen 5 chips, the Ryzen 9 9900X and 9950X, I noticed that