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.
What I found interesting is that the “Intel baseline” setting doesn’t seem to be the default. So if a builder sells a pc and manually sets it and the user needs to update/reset the settings to default, they will go back to unlimited.