ASRock has extended its Base Frequency Boost (BFB) technology to Intel’s 9th Gen processors, after announcing it for the newly launched 10th Gen lineup. As the name suggests, BFB pushes the base frequency on Intel’s 14nm chips up by a notch. It does so by increasing the TDP rather considerably, resulting in significantly higher operating clocks. This little tweak will be useful for motherboards that don’t have the value of PL2 and Tau overridden by OEMs.
While all three higher-end 400 series chipsets support Base Frequency Boost, in the case of the 300 series it’s limited to the Z390 and the B365. BFB promises to elevate the base clocks by as much as 1 GHz in case of the non-K chips by raising the TDP (PL1) from 65W to 125W. While I’m skeptical if this will actually improve the performance in general workloads, it’ll certainly have a negative effect on the power draw and thermals.
