A BIOS update silently killed my RAM performance, and I didn't notice for two years

Published Aug 2, 2026, 5:30 PM EDT Hamlin has been in the tech field for over nine years. Since 2017, his work has appeared on MakeUseOf, Android Police, OSXDaily, Beebom, and more. He served as the Senior Editor at Valnet's MakeUseOf for over two years before joining XDA. He uses a high-end gaming rig for desktop use and a MacBook for traveling, but dislikes some of the quirks of macOS. You're more likely to catch him at the gym or on a flight than anywhere else. One of the first things we do after building a PC is boot into the BIOS and make sure XMP is enabled so that our RAM runs at its rated speed. I clearly remember doing just that when I first built my current PC with a Ryzen 9 5900X in 2020. After that, I never gave my RAM speed another thought. Usually, you have almost no reason to. But then, when I eventually upgraded to the 5800X3D, I had to update the BIOS before swapping the CPU. My PC booted just fine, and everything worked as intended, even while gaming. The CPU upgrade alone significantly improved GPU usage across the board, since my 5900X used to bottleneck my RTX 4090. So it didn't really cross my mind to double-check the BIOS after the upgrade. But about two years later, while glancing at the Performance tab in Task Manager, I noticed that my RAM was running at 2133MT/s instead of 3600MT/s. I know, that's not exactly half, but it was still nowhere near where it was supposed to be. A BIOS update disabled my XMP profile So my RAM had been running at JEDEC speeds since the 5800X3D upgrade My ROG Strix X570-E motherboard is from 2019, so I had to update the BIOS before it would support my old Ryzen 9 5900X because Zen 3 didn't exist when the motherboard launched. Since that was my first time setting up the PC, I naturally went into the BIOS and enabled DOCP (ASUS' implementation of XMP). When I switched to the 5800X3D later, I had to update the BIOS again, but this time, I just assumed my settings would stick. That turned out to be a big mistake. I remember my PC rebooting a couple of times after installing the 5800X3D, which I didn't think much of at the time. Looking back, those reboots were most likely the motherboard retraining the memory after the BIOS update. Since DOCP had been reset, it would have trained the memory using the default JEDEC profile instead. I had no reason to suspect anything because Windows booted normally after that, and nothing really felt sluggish. Even while gaming, the only thing I really noticed was higher frame rates in CPU-bound titles where my 5900X used to struggle to keep up with my RTX 4090. The 5800X3D made it harder to notice AMD's X3D CPUs aren't nearly as sensitive to memory speeds In hindsight, upgrading from the 5900X to the 5800X3D was probably the worst possible scenario for catching this kind of mistake. Even with my RAM running at 2133MT/s, the 5800X3D still delivered a noticeable improvement in the CPU-bound games I play the most, like Valorant and Apex Legends. Seeing that my GPU utilization was higher than before was enough to convince me that I was getting the performance I paid for. So the last thing on my mind was going back into the BIOS to double-check my settings. That's what made this so surprising. Standard Ryzen CPUs have always been more sensitive to memory speeds, and DDR4-3600 CL16 was widely considered the sweet spot for Zen 3. But now I know X3D chips are different because their massive L3 cache drastically reduces how often they need to access system RAM. So any difference in performance that a standard Ryzen chip may have exposed immediately was largely masked by the 5800X3D. That's why it took a 360Hz monitor to show me what I was missing out on. Monitoring my performance eventually exposed it Frame times and 1% lows finally gave it away I was using a 240Hz monitor when I first got the 5800X3D. In esports titles, I was already maxing out my monitor's refresh rate, so I didn't really feel the need to chase every last frame. But that changed when I upgraded to a 360Hz OLED in 2024. I started monitoring my frame times and 1% lows closely because the OLED's motion clarity made even slight inconsistencies more noticeable. And that's when I realized something was off. The frame time graph wasn't nearly as flat as I expected it to be, and my 1% and 0.1% lows weren't much better than I remembered from my 5900X. My average frame rates were still higher, and a slower LCD monitor didn't really make me question anything. So once I checked the Task Manager, I was genuinely surprised to see my RAM running at just 2133MT/s instead of 3600MT/s. I immediately rebooted into the BIOS, enabled the DOCP profile, and booted back into Windows. And sure enough, my frame times and 1% lows were significantly better. There were barely any microstutters that I could notice anymore, and even my average FPS improved a bit. That's all it took for me to realize I'd been leaving performance on the table for almost two years. I'm never skipping the BIOS check after an update again If there's one thing I learned from this experience, it's that BIOS updates can quietly reset the settings you changed years ago without any obvious warning. With an X3D CPU, it's even harder to notice that something has changed because these chips aren't as sensitive to memory speeds. So, it's worth taking a minute to check the BIOS, especially after a CPU swap, to make sure crucial performance-related settings, such as your XMP or EXPO profile, PBO settings, and Resizable BAR, are still configured the way you left them.