Turn off the SMT technology that Ryzen 7 9700X processors bring has a positive effect on gamesand also in applications that primarily rely on monolithic performance, such as synthetic tests aimed at measuring performance with only one active core. Cinebench R23 and Geekbench 6 are two of the most well-known, although they also measure multi-threaded performance.

SMT technology is equivalent to Intel HyperThreading and behaves like it. In short, with activated technology each core can work with one process and one thread. This is integrated into the free spaces that the processor has relative to the main process and is coordinated with the rest of the threads.

Thanks to SMT, it is possible to significantly increase the performance of the processor in multi-threaded applications. So much so that there are cases where a processor with fewer cores that has SMT can perform better than a processor with fewer cores and no SMT. For example, I have seen cases where a processor with 4 cores and 8 threads performs better than another with 6 cores and 6 threads. PBO also improves performance, as I told you in my Ryzen 7 9700X analysis.

However, this does not mean that this technology is perfect and always has a positive impact. There are cases where it can reduce performance. This usually happens in apps and games that they are not designed to take advantage of a high degree of parallelizationand which tend to mix processes and threads instead of prioritizing main processes on physical cores.

Disabling SMT improves Ryzen 7 9700X gaming performance by up to 3.5%

There is an explanation for this, which is that there has been an improvement in single-threaded CPU performance and game execution occurs only in physical cores of which parallelization of a maximum of 8 processes. This level is optimal for any current game, and therefore there is no loss of performance, but rather the opposite.

Disabling SMT on the Ryzen 5 9600X I’m pretty sure we would encounter some performance lossesbecause that would be six cores and six threads, and games like Cyberpunk 2077 are able to optimally parallelize eight threads. However, in other games with less parallelization capacity, the opposite can happen.

As expected, disabling SMT reduces performance in multi-threaded applications such as Cinebench 24, where the Ryzen 7 9700X comes from. 1,208 points (1,268 with PBO) to 949 points. With maximum PBO, this processor achieves 1,018 points, a score that is close to the result obtained by the Ryzen 7 7800X3D configured with 8 cores and 16 threads.

If you are going to use Ryzen 7 9700X mainly for playing Disabling SMT and enabling PBO is undoubtedly a good idea, but if you plan to work with it in multi-threaded applications, it’s better to leave SMT enabled, because in the end it makes a significant difference in multi-threaded environments and significantly improves performance, that’s all. You can easily make these adjustments using the Ryzen Master tool.