As revealed by Phoronix, Intel's new '200S Boost' feature for its Arrow Lake chips results in little to no performance improvements on Linux. This parallels our 200S Boost testing in Windows, where memory overclocking from DDR5-6400 to DDR5-8000 accounted for most of the performance increases across gaming and productivity.
In the six months following Arrow Lake's debut, Intel has issued several fixes to extract every last bit of performance from these chips. The first wave was delivered via Windows Updates and updated BIOS versions in December, addressing several major issues. Following that, board partners released the long-awaited 0x114 microcode in January through BIOS updates carrying the ME19.0.0.1854v2.2 firmware.
Earlier this month, Intel debuted its IPO program in China, allowing System Integrators to offer enhanced power ratings and clock speeds under warranty. Similar to IPO, Intel's '200S Boost' profiles are opt-in BIOS presets available globally, enabling higher fabric, die-to-die, and memory-transfer speeds than stock.
Phoronix's test suite features the Core Ultra 9 285K, the Asus ROG Maximus Z890 Hero (1801 BIOS), the RX 7900 XTX, and 32GB of DDR5-6400 memory. The tests were conducted in Ubuntu 25.04 with the Linux kernel version 6.14. Gaming remained largely similar to stock, with small improvements in Counter-Strike 2 and Batman: Arkham Knight, while Dirt Rally 2.0 saw a significant drop in FPS (456 FPS vs 406 FPS) when switching to the boost profile.
Moving to productivity, compilation tests were slightly faster with no real impact on rendering workloads. That's generally the sentiment across most real-world or synthetic benchmarks, and there's a good reason for that. The most significant factor driving the gains observed with Intel's 200S Boost is the support for faster memory speeds. If you want to get the most out of these profiles, consider faster DDR5-7200 or DDR5-8000 memory kits, because the results from only overclocking the NGU or D2D interconnects are imperceptible. Our testing corroborates that.
Phoronix's test bench stuck to a standard DDR5-6400 kit, and the improvements were so tiny you needed to look for them. We saw a similar effect in Windows when comparing the boost profile vs stock using the same DDR5-6400 kit, for a 0.8% increase in FPS across a geomean of 16 games.
While this is a step in the right direction, you'll need a better memory kit for actual improvements. Likewise, these profiles don't exactly guarantee stability with faster RAM. They only offer warranty coverage, and I'm guessing most people who buy DDR5-8000 kits are already using them at their rated speeds with XMP.
Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button.
