Asus and MSI have become the first motherboard manufacturers to support AMD’s new EXPO Ultra Low Latency BIOS feature, giving supported memory kits a quick, automatic overclock and timing tightening to enhance performance in games and other applications. In AMD’s own testing, the update boosted most games by an average of 4%, and some by as much as 27%.
AMD showed off its new EXPO ULL feature at Computex, highlighting how it adjusts a number of minute timing controls that can also be manually tweaked by the user if they want to. The tightened timings can lead to a notable increase in game performance—enough that it’s worth enabling, if you can. The only downside is that you need a compatible memory kit to do so.
You also need a compatible motherboard. Fortunately, those are becoming far more common, with MSI and Asus now offering support for the new feature across their various X670E board ranges. This covers all Asus Crosshair and STRIX gaming laptops, as well as MSI’s MEG X670E Godlike board. More are surely to come.
The only downside is you’ll need to buy a new compatible kit.
Credit: AMD
Asus previously released a beta BIOS update for its Crosshair X870E motherboards. That feature added automatic ULL overclocking and timing adjustments and gave users access to specific controls such as “TccdL,” “TccdL_WR,” and “TccdL_WR2.”
This is the secret sauce behind ULL. Previously, AMD memory partners making their own EXPO profiles were only permitted to adjust the four primary timings: the numbers you often see quoted by a memory kit’s speed. CL, TRP, etc. Now, with the ULL, AMD is letting memory and motherboard partners adjust sub-timings, giving them greater granularity of control.
One caveat to all this is that it will have a greater impact with CPUs that aren’t X3D. All the extra cache on that chip makes memory latency far less important—it simply has the cache it needs on hand. But the impact can still be felt, and on non-X3D CPUs it should be much more dramatic.
But you still need compatible memory. If you’re upgrading this year, look out for ULL support for maximum possible performance, but I have to imagine it’ll come at a premium.
