April 22nd - Addressing the recent wave of instability plaguing Intel's 13th and 14th Generation Core i9 processors, ASUS has released a new BIOS update featuring a crucial addition: the "Intel Baseline Profile" option.
Enabling this feature allows users to switch their motherboard's default settings to Intel's recommended factory presets, encompassing fundamental functionalities and power constraints, thereby enhancing stability, particularly in specific gaming scenarios.
It's anticipated that other motherboard manufacturers will swiftly follow suit, rolling out similar BIOS updates to address these issues.
In recent months, many gamers have encountered frequent crashes with 13th and 14th generation Core i9 and even i7 processors. Either numerous Unreal Engine 5 games fail to run properly (citing insufficient VRAM), or various blue screen crashes occur after a few months of use. Intel has acknowledged the issue and is investigating.
According to various analyses, it's believed that the frequencies and power consumption of the 13th and 14th generation Core i9/i7 CPUs are pushed too high. Additionally, motherboard manufacturers commonly set power limits to nearly infinite 4096W, leading to excessively high actual power consumption and resulting crashes.
For instance, crashes during gaming typically occur during the shader compilation phase, when loading is visible on the screen.
According to user feedback, affected models include i9-14900K/KS/KF, i9-13900K/KS, i7-14700K, i7-13700K, and others, with the 13900K and 14900K being more prevalent, possibly due to their popularity among high-end gamers.
The temporary fix was simply to throttle down, say to 200MHz, to achieve stability.
Media tests confirm that while the new BIOS does enhance stability, it does so at a cost — performance takes a hit.
For instance, with the i9-14900KS, the multi-core score in CineBench R23 drops by nearly 13%, putting it below the Ryzen 9 7950X. Even its global first at 6.2GHz loses significance.
New BIOS
Legacy BIOS
