Your CPU got faster after you bought it, but only if you installed one update

Published Oct 29, 2026, 7:00 AM EDT Abhinav pivoted from a career in banking to pursue his first love in writing. Even while working full-time, he continued contributing as an editor-at-large, a role he has held for more than 7 years. A lifelong tech enthusiast who has built three gaming and productivity powerhouse PCs since 2018, his passion for technology keeps him closely following the semiconductor industry, from NVIDIA and AMD to ARM. His MSc dissertation explored how artificial intelligence will reshape the future of work, reflecting his curiosity about the wider social impact of emerging technologies. When it comes to routine PC maintenance activities, most tasks run on autopilot. Your GPU's utility nags you to update your drivers, your app store pushes new app builds in the background, and your operating system practically forces its patches on your PC. Unlike all of these, your BIOS never sends any nudges or reminders, and the result is that it sits untouched, often for years, while everything around it moves forward. Perhaps what's even worse is that some users don't even realize that the BIOS needs updating at all. That's a bit of a problem. When you don't update your OS or the apps you've downloaded, you miss bug fixes, critical security updates, and more often than not, some added performance. It's the same case with your BIOS, and the only difference is that, in this case, is that the firmware that controls how your CPU boosts, manages power, and talks to your memory stays frozen on whatever version shipped with the motherboard. Your CPU is limited by the firmware just as much as the silicon The chip can only do what the BIOS tells it to One of the most crucial aspects that make the BIOS so important in modern computing is the fact that a lot of aspects of the CPU's behavior are managed directly by the BIOS. It governs how hard (and for how long) it boosts, how much power it pulls, and even how quickly the cores communicate with one another. The entire rulebook is inside your motherboard's firmware, through AMD's AGESA and Intel's microcode, and a BIOS update is the only way to rewrite it. Take the AMD Ryzen 9000 series launch as an example. The Ryzen 5 9600X and the Ryzen 7 9700X launched with a TDP of 65W, which is a fairly conservative power budget for thermal efficiency. However, due to that conservative budget, the chips ran out of power long before they ran out of thermal headroom, and reviewers caught it right away. In an August 2024 review, Digital Foundry noticed review sample of the 9700X chip peaking at just 62°C, which they corrected by raising the limit to 105W through PBO and ended up getting 13.5% more performance on multicore performance because of it. This was later corrected by AMD as well through AGESA 1.2.0.2, which added an official 105W mode for both the chips as a single BIOS toggle with warranty protection, and the same firmware cut core-to-core latency on dual CCD Ryzen 9 parts. As you can probably tell, enthusiasts can notice the performance variance and correct it through PBO themselves, but it would escape the notice of most average users who will likely never benchmark their hardware, much less head into the BIOS to overclock the chip. As a result, such a user would quietly be sacrificing the performance their chip is capable of delivering. Some BIOS updates exist to keep your CPU alive (and well) A degraded chip is worse than any bottleneck there is The next thing that should nudge most users to finally take a look at their pending BIOS updates is that it doesn't affect just performance, but can also determine how long their chips last. There's absolutely no hyperbole intended here, because sometimes, a BIOS update is what stands between your CPU and permanent damage. To know exactly how detrimental to a CPU's health missed BIOS updates can be, look no further than the example of Intel's 13th and 14th Gen chips. In September 2024, the Raptor Lake CPUs got an official diagnosis of an issue that had been affecting them for months. Intel traced the problem for crashes and instability to the chips requesting elevated voltages even during idle and light workloads, which wore down a clock circuit inside the cores. The fix to this was microcode 0x12B, which had to be loaded through a BIOS update. As you can expect, any chip that degraded while waiting for that update stayed degraded. On the AMD side, there's one such similar story. Through 2025, a number of Ryzen 7 9800X3D owners kept reporting dead chips that shared a common denominator, which was, as it turns out, specific variants of ASRock boards. The board manufacturer shipped their mid and high-end SKUs like the B650E Steel Legend and X670E Taichi with aggressive PBO settings in the BIOS, which resulted in the chips drawing more current than they could handle. It took more than 100 reports of dead Ryzen 7 9800X3D and Ryzen 9 9950X chips before ASRock acknowledged and fixed the problem through BIOS 3.25 by lowering the Thermal Design Current and Electrical Design Current limits. To put a price on the problem, the Ryzen chips launched at $479 and $649, and since ASRock's warranty covers only the board and not the CPU, anyone who missed those updates found themselves looking at an expensive replacement bill. Without BIOS updates, your CPU can't access the latest features If your firmware predates them, the option doesn't exist for you Sometimes, a BIOS update can add more value to your CPU by adding more features that simply weren't available at the time you bought the chip. In 2025, Intel introduced 200S Boost for its Core Ultra 200S K-series chips on Z890 SKUs. The one-click profile it added raised the fabric clock down from 2.6GHz to 3.2GHz and the die-to-die clock from 2.1GHz to 3.2GHz. The very same update extended Intel's warranty to memory running at up to DDR5-8000, up from DDR5-6400. In a test, Tom's Hardware measured an average gain of 7.5% with it enabled, which meant that anyone still on the older BIOS version had effectively opted themselves out of what can only be described as a free, warranty-backed performance upgrade. Not updating your BIOS can cost you performance and security CPUs are central to your PC's performance, and much of everything you do in your day-to-day workflow revolves around how well it performs. So, it is indeed silly to overlook an update to something that governs many critical aspects of its performance, especially considering how safe and easy it has become over time. Many modern boards now come with a BIOS Flashback button, which can flash firmware from a USB drive without a CPU or RAM installed. What that means is that a failed update is now something you can recover from. If you haven't checked if your BIOS is up-to-date in a while, it's a hundred-percent worth doing, at the very least once a year.