Intel wants to throttle the power of Cardboard Raptor Lake

In early April, Intel began an investigation into stability issues with the company's processors from the Raptor Lake and Raptor Lake Refresh families. It mainly concerns the Core i9-13900K/S and Core i9-14900K/S models, where the majority of users reported crashes while gaming. Since then, Intel has blamed the stability issues on motherboard manufacturers using too-hard cardboard power settings, which would then cause the processor to operate outside of its specifications.

This has led the majority of motherboard manufacturers, including Asus and Gigabyte, to introduce a new setting in the BIOS called “Intel Baseline”, which should then set power values ​​and other parameters in line with Intel's recommendation. However, the settings that apply vary widely between different manufacturers, and since Intel has not published any general guidelines, it is difficult to know what applies as official settings for each processor model.

Now independent sources are doing just that Benchlab And Igor's laboratory In connection with that, Intel has sent a recommendation to its motherboard partners that they should introduce a new global setting in the BIOS called “Intel Defaults”, which should then apply the correct values ​​​​according to the company's processor-specific instructions. Part of the recommendation is also that this setting should be applied as the primary application when the user turns on the system for the first time.

Loses performance

What's worth noting is that the maximum power values ​​specified under Intel Defaults are 188W, which is much lower than the Core i9-13900K and Core i9-14900K's maximum power of 253W. What this means in practice is that the processors will lose some performance, especially in multi-threaded loads – which means that the level will be slightly lower than previously published results in relation to reviews of various hardware sites.

According to the information, Intel wants motherboard manufacturers to release new BIOS versions with “Intel Default Settings” as the default setting before May 31, 2024. In this regard, the company is also expected to issue an official statement on the matter. Which will hopefully provide more clarity on the parameters and settings included in Intel's recommendations for Lake Raptor.