But energy consumption drops by as much as 20%
So, the solution to the problem with the most powerful Intel processors in games — decreased productivity. Asus has already released BIOS updates for its motherboards that support the Intel Baseline Profile. And there are already tests of the Core i9-14900K in this mode.
Performance is expectedly lower, and sometimes quite noticeably. For example, if in single-threaded mode in Cinebench R23 performance decreases by only 1%, which can be neglected, then in multi-threaded mode the figure already reaches 9%, which is quite a lot. In Y-Cruncher the drop is 11%, and on average we can talk about a decrease of 8–9%. Considering that the Core i9-14900K is one of the most powerful CPUs on the market, many will not even notice such a decrease, although in general the situation is not the best.
Unfortunately, HardwareLuxx only tested games at 720p resolution. Yes, this allows us to maximize the influence of the CPU on the result and we see a drop of the same 8%, but these results have nothing to do with reality. But we can assume that at higher resolutions the performance degradation will be lower.
But you can definitely rejoice at the reduction in energy consumption, by 20% at once, and the temperature has dropped by 12%.
In the end, it’s not very clear why the problem became widespread only in recent months, because it also affects the Core i9-13900K, and it has been on the market for more than a year. But this could clearly affect what Intel’s top desktop CPUs will be like in the next generations, since the company is unlikely to want to repeat this story.