Earlier this month, we wrote that some of Intel’s recent high-end Core i9 and Core i7 processors had been crashing and exhibiting other weird issues in some games and that Intel was investigating the cause.
An Intel statement obtained by Igor’s Lab suggests that Intel’s investigation is wrapping up, and the company is pointing squarely in the direction of enthusiast motherboard makers that are turning up power limits and disabling safeguards to try to wring a little more performance out of the processors.
“While the root cause has not yet been identified, Intel has observed the majority of reports of this issue are from users with unlocked/overclock capable motherboards,” the statement reads. “Intel has observed 600/700 Series chipset boards often set BIOS defaults to disable thermal and power delivery safeguards designed to limit processor exposure to sustained periods of high voltage and frequency.”
From what I understood from Hardware Unboxed, running without hard power limits is essentially “supported” by Intel and motherboard manufacturers weren’t compelled to stick to the “recommended” power limits.
The fact that the new “Intel Baseline” profile that was pushed to motherboards via a BIOS update is vastly inconsistent between manufacturers leads be to believe that Intel doesn’t clearly state “do this and this as default”.
I find it a bit cheap to put the blame solely on motherboard manufacturers here.
There are also reports of instabilities with CPUs running at supposedly safe power limits. I can’t confirm this but I also wouldn’t be surprised if these power limits also caused silicon degradation at an unexpectedly fast pace.
I was having issues with crashes in multiple games but rdr2 was the worst. I had a rig built with an i9 14900k and Asus hero z790.
I think I finally found the solution and it was to do with the default bios settings for my Asus MB and my i9 14900k.
In the document linked here…
Page 98, Table 17, Row 3: Reveals the stock turbo power limits for the 13900K and 14900K CPUs are 253W, not the 4,000+ my MB’s Bios settings default to. Page 184, Table 77, Row 6: Lists the maximum current limit at 307A, far below the MB’s default of 500+A.
I found this information in a Reddit post (https://www.reddit.com/r/overclocking/comments/1axepvu/optimizing_stability_for_intel_13900k_and_14900k/) and followed the settings as follows:
ASUS Z790 Motherboards:
Save your current settings into a profile so you can return to them later if you want.
Reset your BIOS to default settings. Ai Tweaker tab:
Disable MultiCore Enhancement.
Enable XMP(if your RAM supports it).
Set SVID behavior to Typical Scenario.
Set short duration turbo power = 253
Set long duration turbo power = 253
Set max core/cache current = 307Amps
Doing this immediately stabilised the CPU temps as well as bring down the average temp by ~10 to 15c. It’s been a few months now with zero crashes.
Hope this helps someone
This is not a typo right, 307Amps?!
What creative maths have they done to get this number?The PCB tracks on the motherboard are what, about 0.5mm thick and about 2mm wide (for the larger channels)? I can absolutely guarantee you arent getting 300+ Amps through those tracks.
It’s a 250W+ part running at around 1V, so it’s going to draw a lot of current. Power is supplied via many pins on the back of the CPU, and they’re connected to many traces, so it’s not putting all that current through just one. It still puts out a lot of heat anyway, which is why modern motherboards have large heat sinks, sometimes with fans, on their VRMs.
Thanks!
Oh but you are. It’s at 0.8v to 1.2v range so it’s high current.
This is what all the VRM design is for. The motherboards are generally 20-30 layers nowadays with 2oz copper in the power layers. The traces are short and you do get hundreds of amps.
And yes, I’ve designed them on the silicon side.
I’ve been reading news about this for a bit.
I believe that I may have damaged an i9-13900KF with stock Asus motherboard settings myself (though I can still make it work by disabling all but one core, sees constant problems now with multiple cores active).
If you’re getting one of these yourself, no joke, give serious consideration to using more-conservative-then-stock-motherboard settings.
Did thoes defaults include XMP though? XMP is also overclocking.
On my own motherboard, it is a default, but the article doesn’t list it as being a setting believed to be problematic from a CPU damage standpoint.
Any guidance on choosing appropriate conservative settings for i7-13700K? I may be hit with the same as you in the future (sometimes I have to do some heavy multithreaded combinatorial computations which run several days with 100°C temperature, using all cores). The motherboard has options for customising pretty much everything there is, but I didn’t touch anything overclocking-related, so I have Asus defaults.
The article has a bunch of settings that they say that Intel’s flagged as “don’t use”. Intel will be a better source than me.
