ASRock has released a BIOS update for their Z490 Taichi motherboard which implements a Clever Access Memory (CAM) system (might I say that's as clever as it sounds?) CAM is basically ASRock's own marketing push based on AMD's SAM, which is in itself a marketing push based on PCIe's Resizable BAR feature (the amount of marketing names employed to describe the same set of features is becoming mind-boggling). The feature is available through the 1.72 BETA Bios for the Z490 Taichi motherboard, and WCCFTech ran some quick and dirty tests on a Z490-based system with an AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card to verify what (if any) performance differences arose.

The tests were done at 4K resolution for Shadows of the Tomb Raider and Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, running on an Intel Core i7-10700K processor and 2x 8 GB sticks of DDR4-2666 memory. The results? 3.32% performance improvement under Shadows of the Tomb Raider, and an impressive 11.54% improvement for Assassin's Creed: Valhalla (images to the left feature CAM on, and images on the right show CAM off). It seems it's only a matter of time until this amazing feature that's been available (yet untapped) for years now brings some very considerable and widespread performance improvements to users independent of platform. Kinda like finding a $10 bill in an old pair of jeans.