Intel Core i9-14900K Performance, Before And After It’s Made Less Spicy


Intel Microcode 0x129 BIOS

If you would prefer your 14th generation Raptor Lake processor to not get overly excited and burn itself out, you now have a way to do so.  Your motherboard vendor should have released a new BIOS for your motherboard which contains the microcode 0x129 BIOS fix to limit the amount of power a chip such as the Core i9-14900K can draw.  This should make the chance of your CPU spontaneously combusting about as likely as you dying from the same malady.  TANSTAAFL as they say; there is always a price to be paid somewhere.

The FPS Review decided to find out exactly what the cost in performance is when you decrease the chance of sudden silicon death syndrome.   In their synthetic tests, the patch made little to no difference and the same held true throughout the review.  If you squint really hard you can see that in a handful of multithreaded applications the patch reduces performance between 0.5-1% at most.  Indeed in some cases you actually see a tiny performance improvement, likely because the reduced voltage allows the chip to run at a slightly higher frequency before it hits the thermal ceiling of the chip.

One thing to note is that the patch does not change that thermal ceiling, your system will run at about the same wattage and temperatures as it did previously; without the risk of your chip becoming unusable.



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