News We tested Intel's unreleased '200S Boost' feature: 7% higher gaming performance thanks to memory overclocking, now covered by the warranty

Glad to see some good comparative performance data. Seems like the latency generally makes a bigger difference than the bandwidth for gaming which isn't particularly surprising.

While 200S boost won't have any effect on people who love tweaking everything about their system it's good for those who like one button/simpler solutions that are likely stable. I love messing around with my systems, but there's no denying AMD changed the game here with PBO and Intel still has more work to do.

Appreciate the BIOS revision being listed and I think that's the one MSI mistakenly released last month before taking it down (across their whole Z890 line).

It would be nice if the timings and perhaps exact memory kit model were listed, but I think I was able to get the former just from the names:

6400: 52-52-52-103 (JEDEC)
7200: 34-45-45-115
8000: 38-48-48-84
 
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Finally. Nothing wrong with the performance before the patches, but now it should be slightly more competitive. This to me is proof that the compute tile is not the problem, but instead all the interfaces weren't clocked nearly high enough. This suggests that Intel didn't clock everything as aggressively as before because they didn't want their chips overvolting themselves again.
 
Ehh the 200 series lackluster but if you want bargains the 14th / 13th gen are much cheaper than comparable Ryzen parts.
 
Can you redo the font size on some of the charts?
"multi-threaded performance ranking in win11" and a few others have extremely small font compared to the rest.
I have to enlarge the picture because Tom's web page doesn't support 1080p or higher and shrinks everything, including images down to blurry levels.

And then, for some reason, when I squish the browser to less than 720ish pixel width, Tom's website will enlarge the charts to a legible size.
Like okay, I understand the site being easier to read on a phone, but it's weirdly ill-optimized for 1080p/1440p/4K desktop browsers.
 
While nice to see some performance improvements, under warranty no less...this is still disappointing overall as a whole in gaming. I don't think Intel will ever get these chips to match or exceed 12, 13th or 14th gen chips in games. Productivity wise though Arrow Lake are certainly appealing to those types of use cases.

The big problem is even if I was willing to take the hit in gaming it will be years before I trust Intel after the 13th/14th gen debacle. Sad days for team blue in my book.
 
Appreciate the benchmarks Paul! Does this 200S Boost affect the power consumption of the chips? Did you test for it @PaulAlcorn ?
There will generally be a small amount of increased power consumption from running higher speed memory, but that should be it. Given that Tom's originally tested the 285k with high speed memory kits the power numbers there should be applicable here.

Per the article this 200S Boost doesn't affect power limits:
The Intel 200S Boost feature enhances the performance of Arrow Lake K-series processors by enabling a few overclocking features in an easy-to-use one-click BIOS profile, but the new settings don't impact CPU clock speeds or power settings above current warranty limitations.
 
There will generally be a small amount of increased power consumption from running higher speed memory, but that should be it. Given that Tom's originally tested the 285k with high speed memory kits the power numbers there should be applicable here.

Per the article this 200S Boost doesn't affect power limits:
I saw that but interpreted it as Intel making sure AIBs stay in line and don’t go wild rather than the CPU consuming the amount of power for better gains.
 
I’ve run strictly Intel for the last few decades, but they aren’t worth it right now. The current, and last few generations have been a total let down. When your new chip is significantly worse than your last chip and even those had issues you know you have a major problem. No amount of bs bandaids and overclocks with warranty are going to fix this botched generation. I’m not even sure a 30% price reduction would get sales back on track. There is a reason there is a new CEO and lots of shuffling and selling going on. They need to refocus and actually care about being #1 again and designing and making the best chips possible, not just throwing more power at the same design to get more performance.

AMD is king right now and I’ll gladly support them instead while they remain so. The 9950x3d is a monster and I have zero regrets choosing it for my new system. Intel needs to feel some pain to force them to get back on track. Competition is good, spend your money wisely and don’t be a blindly loyal fanboy. Trust me, their executives don’t give a crap about you or your loyalty. All they care about is their bonuses and options.
 
Competition is good, spend your money wisely and don’t be a blindly loyal fanboy. Trust me, their executives don’t give a crap about you or your loyalty. All they care about is their bonuses and options.
Oh, my goodness. This, this and this. Times a million.

It really narks me sometimes the way people gush about these monstrous shareholder-driven corporations, as if they dump trails of gold in their wake. Intel vs AMD, AMD vs Nvidia, Apple vs Everyone. These companies Do. Not. Care. About. Us. (Except our money of course).
 
I’ve run strictly Intel for the last few decades, but they aren’t worth it right now. The current, and last few generations have been a total let down. When your new chip is significantly worse than your last chip and even those had issues you know you have a major problem. No amount of bs bandaids and overclocks with warranty are going to fix this botched generation. I’m not even sure a 30% price reduction would get sales back on track. There is a reason there is a new CEO and lots of shuffling and selling going on. They need to refocus and actually care about being #1 again and designing and making the best chips possible, not just throwing more power at the same design to get more performance.

AMD is king right now and I’ll gladly support them instead while they remain so. The 9950x3d is a monster and I have zero regrets choosing it for my new system. Intel needs to feel some pain to force them to get back on track. Competition is good, spend your money wisely and don’t be a blindly loyal fanboy. Trust me, their executives don’t give a crap about you or your loyalty. All they care about is their bonuses and options.
You sound like most sane people who bought a 2500K back in the day like myself, nothing has changed, just who makes the best CPU's, except the one issue, the X3D parts are now ludicrously priced compared to what the average gamer needs to compete in multiplayer games or even use for high-refresh to the point it's only for those spending 2000-3000 on GPU's mostly.


You said 13th and 14th gen are bad, they only are if all you compare is power usage, which in games is typically under 100w.

The issue here, this is not an FX vs i5 situation, the 13th & 14th gen more than keep a fierce presence in gaming and do very well in work tasks, they are priced reasonably too.


If best is all you want, sure!
 
You sound like most sane people who bought a 2500K back in the day like myself, nothing has changed, just who makes the best CPU's, except the one issue, the X3D parts are now ludicrously priced compared to what the average gamer needs to compete in multiplayer games or even use for high-refresh to the point it's only for those spending 2000-3000 on GPU's mostly.


You said 13th and 14th gen are bad, they only are if all you compare is power usage, which in games is typically under 100w.

The issue here, this is not an FX vs i5 situation, the 13th & 14th gen more than keep a fierce presence in gaming and do very well in work tasks, they are priced reasonably too.


If best is all you want, sure!
Everything good is ludicrously priced. Have you bought eggs lately? 😂

Since Covid the only consumer goods that are reasonably priced are the versions no one really wants but settles for because of cost.
 
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