AMD AGESA update 1.0.0.6 – Do BIOS updates matter?

Memory Latency

With AGESA version 1.0.04 focusing on memory latency, it is only logical to check whether or not AMD has continued to improve memory latency with AGESA 1.0.0.6. 

Sadly with AGESA version 1.0.0.6 and ASUS’s new 9945 beta BIOS showed almost no improvement in this regard, showing a mere 0.5% decrease in memory latency. This change was consistent with multiple benchmark runs but it is certainly nothing much to write home about.   

With AMD already improving memory latency by 6% with AGESA version 1.0.0.4 it is difficult to see AMD further reducing this number by another large margin, though it will be interesting to see if we can decrease this number by using faster DDR4 memory or memory with tighter CAS timing in the future.  

Memory Speed

Moving to memory speed we can see that there actually is a notable performance difference with this new BIOS version, though again this performance change isn’t that large in the grand scheme if thing. We see Copy speeds in AIDA 64 go almost unchanged while Read performance increased by almost 3.2% and write performance decreased by 1.05%. 

Both the copy and write performance here is very similar, the boost in read performance is noteworthy, though it is impossible to tell whether these performance changes are due to AMD’s new AGESA microcode or due to other changes in ASUS’ beta BIOS.