We study the formal semantics of non-volatile memory in the x86-TSO architecture. We show that while the recent model of Raad et al. from POPL’20 has asynchronous explicit persist operations, it is equivalent, in terms of reachable states, to a (novel) model with synchronous operations, which is much closer to common developers’ understanding of persistency semantics. We further introduce a simpler and stronger sequentially consistent persistency model, develop a sound mapping from the this stronger model to x86, and establish a data-race-freedom guarantee providing programmers with a safe programming discipline. Our operational models are accompanied with equivalent declarative formulations, which facilitate our formal arguments, and may prove useful for program verification under x86 persistency.