Intel Ships 0x129 Microcode Update for 13th and 14th Generation Processors with Stability Issues

[vMax65]

Does anyone else think that "incorrect voltage requests to the processor that are causing elevated operating voltage" is just an excuse for pushing the voltage to be able to compete with AMD?

As a 14900K user (no issues as I limited mine to 1.350v from the start), yes! Sadly Intel I think did decide to push these CPU's to the max to compete with the X3D CPUs' and they also wanted to keep the highest Ghz victory as well....In doing so they and the Motherboard manufacturers also had a huge hand in this, really pushed the CPU's especially the i9 series way to high without thinking or fine tuning the voltages. The worst part is that they did not need to and could have still got great perforamnce with some fine tuning. Anyway this is a lesson for both AMD and Intel and I think AMD have limited there new 9000 series already showing the underwhelming performance figures.

Intel have extended the warranty for a further two years for all 13th and 14th gen which is a start and I believe RMA's are going through a bit more smoothly though losing your CPU for a week or two cannot be a nice thing.

Alright, that sounds close enough. So I moved ac/dc up to 110. Reduced ecores to 8. pcores 53x and ecores 42x. pl1 125 pl2 175 (is that right? I like to keep them the same personally). The only difference is I can't apply that offset (not without doing things I don't want to do anyway)... And I wasn't sure what you usually do for load testing but I saw you mentioned cpu-z so I tried that and this is what I got: (should I have pressed stress cpu instead? I'm not really that familiar with this one).


View attachment 358601

Max vcore of 1.35. See that seems more normal to me. If a -75mv offset were stable on here ( don't know, don't want to try, since it involves ucode 104 which I've had bad luck with - twice! That thing is cursed). That would put us roughly around the same, right? If I were to jump to conclusions, it would almost seem like 13700k and 14700k aren't even binned that differently. I guess I assumed that was the whole point of the new gen. No new silicon, but move the bins up a tier.

Anyway yeah thats why I do have to use the ac/dc loadline as other than frequency its pretty much my only tool to affect vcore while staying up to date. But I can only get so far with it. 90 seems to have the same performance as 110 at least as far as I can see. Somebody on reddit suggested 60 but my performance nosedived. I guess some people increase llc to make up for this but w/e. Intel's whole system is just too complicated as far as I'm concerned. I'm just gonna run intel defaults with ac/dc at 90 and turbo 3 off, vid limit of 1.5 and try to forget about it.
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Off topic but last time I ran this test on my 14700k, the score was 14700, I'm not even kidding... I think I still have the pic.....

View attachment 358607
lol!

I use to have a Gigabyte motherboard and all I can say it the bios was a mess and once you start making any voltage changes things can go off very quickly. In fact even wwhen I made changes the old changes were not removed and only a hard bios reset. removing battery would get oit back to normal...I was pulling out my hair...changed to ASUS which was also just another painful experience as the voltage they ware pushing on anything auto or 'multicore enhancment' was a joke. On MSI now which has been better but they too were pushing too much but in terms of fine grained control, it seems a lot better. Only manufacturer I have not tried is AS Rock.

 

[stimpy88]

As a 14900K user (no issues as I limited mine to 1.350v from the start)

How did you know to do this, such a specific number..? I keep seeing this exact (1.350v) comment a lot lately, and it seems that everybody seemed to know that going higher than this was going to kill their CPU's years ago... Strange.

 

[vMax65]

Alright, that sounds close enough. So I moved ac/dc up to 110. Reduced ecores to 8. pcores 53x and ecores 42x. pl1 125 pl2 175 (is that right? I like to keep them the same personally). The only difference is I can't apply that offset (not without doing things I don't want to do anyway)... And I wasn't sure what you usually do for load testing but I saw you mentioned cpu-z so I tried that and this is what I got: (should I have pressed stress cpu instead? I'm not really that familiar with this one).


View attachment 358601

Max vcore of 1.35. See that seems more normal to me. If a -75mv offset were stable on here ( don't know, don't want to try, since it involves ucode 104 which I've had bad luck with - twice! That thing is cursed). That would put us roughly around the same, right? If I were to jump to conclusions, it would almost seem like 13700k and 14700k aren't even binned that differently. I guess I assumed that was the whole point of the new gen. No new silicon, but move the bins up a tier.

Anyway yeah thats why I do have to use the ac/dc loadline as other than frequency its pretty much my only tool to affect vcore while staying up to date. But I can only get so far with it. 90 seems to have the same performance as 110 at least as far as I can see. Somebody on reddit suggested 60 but my performance nosedived. I guess some people increase llc to make up for this but w/e. Intel's whole system is just too complicated as far as I'm concerned. I'm just gonna run intel defaults with ac/dc at 90 and turbo 3 off, vid limit of 1.5 and try to forget about it.
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Off topic but last time I ran this test on my 14700k, the score was 14700, I'm not even kidding... I think I still have the pic.....

View attachment 358607
lol!

Looking at you scores and HWinfo, things are not looking bad at all, in fact more than good as stock it is in the mid 12K scores for a 14700K on CPUZ. Getting a 14700 score for a 14700K! 1.35v at limit is more than good and should more than keep the CPU in good nick. I think the sweetspot is the 13700k/14700k for performance enthusiasts and will do well across the board from gaming to semi pro and pro workloads. Fine tuning voltage or undervolting can make it more effecient but you cpu looks like it is in a good place.

How did you know to do this, such a specific number..? I keep seeing this exact comment a lot lately, and it seems that everybody seemed to know that going higher than this was going to kill their CPU's years ago... Strange.

How? As a K cpu user going back way too many years and someone who has always been interested in overclocking (why else buy a K CPU if not to tweak!), one of the first things I learned from many, many others and a big shout out to the 'overclock.com' forums was voltages and how to keep temps in check...In fact temps were an issues especially on the intel side going all the way back to the 4790K devils canyon CPU. Excessive voltage has been known to degrade CPU's though to be honest this might be a bit hard to quantify as I am not sure how many people keep there CPU's past five years to really test this out, but going back to why 1.350v or lower, this seems to be the sweetspot which allows for pretty much full stock performance, i.e hitting the recommended speed whilst keeping temps in check and a good mumber or below to protect the CPU, with undervolting or having a bit of luck with a decent CPU you can go even lower on voltages and still have a very stable CPU.

 

[stimpy88]

How? As a K cpu user going back way too many years and someone who has always been interested in overclocking (why else buy a K CPU if not to tweak!), one of the first things I learned from many, many others and a big shout out to the 'overclock.com' forums was voltages and how to keep temps in check...In fact temps were an issues especially on the intel side going all the way back to the 4790K devils canyon CPU. Excessive voltage has been known to degrade CPU's though to be honest this might be a bit hard to quantify as I am not sure how many people keep there CPU's past five years to really test this out, but going back to why 1.350v or lower, this seems to be the sweetspot which allows for pretty much full stock performance, i.e hitting the recommended speed whilst keeping temps in check and a good mumber or below to protect the CPU, with undervolting or having a bit of luck with a decent CPU you can go even lower on voltages and still have a very stable CPU.

Interesting. I'm fully aware of lowering voltages to reduce heat, but did not know an Intel customer buying high-end models would have expected degradation of a CPU at stock settings. I have seen people with this new microcode that it still shoves 1.475v+ at the CPU... Stock settings...

 

[vMax65]

Interesting. I'm fully aware of lowering voltages to reduce heat, but did not know an Intel customer buying high-end models would have expected degradation of a CPU at stock settings. I have seen people with this new microcode that it still shoves 1.475v+ at the CPU... Stock settings...

Not saying you will get degredation at stock settings as if that was the case, this would have been an issue many, many years ago and it has not but the whole reason for having K 'unlocked' CPU's was to overclock and now undervolt and to tweak and of course you are getting the most performant parts Intel has. With a bit of learning and knowledge you learn things like 1.5 to 1.6v is not good for the long term! So many forums dedicated to getting the best out of these CPU's from effeciency focus to balls out max performance and everything in between. You also learn what is a good balance between performance, effecieny and tempratures and generally it is known 1.4v or lower is okay. In this generation, Intel and I also blame the motherboard manufacturers went full send on pushing these CPU's in order to compete with AMD.....though AMD keep shooting themselves in the foot whilst Intel is massively crudding up...own goal or what. AMD really need a new marketing department and quickly!

As to the new microcode still pushing 1.475v this is expected in short bursts but 1.5v+ to 1.6v is a problem and on my MSI Z790 Carbon Wifi even at auto, seen nothing hitting 1.5v even on the Intel Extreme profile...Still a bet some motherboard manufacturers are srtuggling to get the new bios fine tuned and right.

 

[BoggledBeagle]

...1.35v at limit is more than good and should more than keep the CPU in good nick. I think the sweetspot is the 13700k/14700k for performance enthusiasts and will do well across the board from gaming to semi pro and pro workloads. ....
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why 1.350v or lower, this seems to be the sweetspot which allows for pretty much full stock performance
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I highly doubt that 1,35V is low enough voltage for high intensity 24/7 professional usage.

We complain about stock settings, but in the same time you would like to maintain stock performance? That does not make any sense.

"Stock performance" is too high and you will kill the chips trying to maintain it.

Instead of doing the right thing, Intel is desperately trying to maintain the frequencies, because if they lowered the frequencies as they should, they would create a different product with lower performance than what the customers expected when they bought the chips.

Intel will need to figure how to deal with this lower performing product, because trying to keep the breakneck frequencies is simply not possible.

 

[iameatingjam]

I use to have a Gigabyte motherboard and all I can say it the bios was a mess and once you start making any voltage changes things can go off very quickly. In fact even wwhen I made changes the old changes were not removed and only a hard bios reset. removing battery would get oit back to normal...I was pulling out my hair...changed to ASUS which was also just another painful experience as the voltage they ware pushing on anything auto or 'multicore enhancment' was a joke. On MSI now which has been better but they too were pushing too much but in terms of fine grained control, it seems a lot better. Only manufacturer I have not tried is AS Rock.

Looking at you scores and HWinfo, things are not looking bad at all, in fact more than good as stock it is in the mid 12K scores for a 14700K on CPUZ. Getting a 14700 score for a 14700K! 1.35v at limit is more than good and should more than keep the CPU in good nick. I think the sweetspot is the 13700k/14700k for performance enthusiasts and will do well across the board from gaming to semi pro and pro workloads. Fine tuning voltage or undervolting can make it more effecient but you cpu looks like it is in a good place.

Yeah.... that all sounds familiar to me too. Like putting in settings but they don't stick, have to put them in 3 or 4 times before the damn thing acknowledges it. Or when something goes wrong so you change the value back yet its still unstable so your only choice is to pop out the battery and then you have to redo all your settings. All that said... I still like this mobo... don't ask me why...

But when it comes to the voltages, the recent updates do seem to be trying to reign that stuff in. This cpu has actually been acting all right the last couple days. When I first took the chains off I was a bit worried by a max vcore of 1.44 but since doing the 13700k emulation ( thats when I got 1.35 max btw), then going back, and I don't know why, it hasn't been as bad, it doesn't pass 1.4v 99% of the time and when it does its only 1.41 or something. Most of the time its in the 1.2s and or 1.3s. Like right now I've just been gaming and vcore is at 1.34. But its not like its a heavy load just sandland at 4k60 plus firefox and a couple utilities, but it doesn't seem to get all that much higher under the heavy loads. Plus with this new ucode I know there's not going to be any crazy transients. Maybe it will be okay in the end?

Uh oh, I just jynxed it, didn't I?

But surprisingly, I put in a 1.5v vid limit and I thought okay there's no way this is going to affect performance... but it did. Not alot, but enough to notice in passmark cpu test like 1-2%. I don't think it was run to run variance either because I repeated the test many times making sure nothing else was running in the background etc. There's clearly more going on behind the scenes than our monitoring software is telling us because neither hwmonitor or hwinfo reports vid anywhere near 1.5. Maybe intel does know what they are doing? I'm not sure to keep that limit there or not. Right now I removed it, not for the performance but just cause.... well, I'm just following intel's instructions.

Not saying I trust them all of a sudden but idk what if that limit messes with something I don't understand? There's just so many people out there with so many takes, it gets kinda exhausting you know? And I got my rma too. And even if I don't get cross shipping, I still have my handy dandy 12100 to use in the meantime =D

Does anyone else think that "incorrect voltage requests to the processor that are causing elevated operating voltage" is just an excuse for pushing the voltage to be able to compete with AMD?

I have a feeling that both its not nearly that simple, but also that there's probably a kernel of truth in there. Just a guess.

 

[RatusNatus]

There is an YT guy recommending 2019 bios because he found out that the MC updates pumps more voltage.....

 

[iameatingjam]

There is an YT guy recommending 2019 bios because he found out that the MC updates pumps more voltage.....

I like tech yes city, haven't watched the whole thing yet, just from your time stamp. But.... Just curious.... if you disabled a bunch of cores and don't change iccmax.., Would that mean more current per core? I've wondered if my first failure was because of too much current. My voltage was low but I used throttlestop which default puts iccmax to its max and at the time I didn't even know what that meant so I didn't change it even though now intel says its a big no-no.

I noticed recommended iccmax from intel for 13700k and 14700k was the same but thats just one ecore cluster.... What about 4 ecore clusters disabled and iccmax not changed, is that... dangerous? Again I don't know maybe he changed it earlier or I got it all wrong. Just something I've been wondering for a while.

Anyway... goodnight.

 

[Caring1]

I watched that video earlier today and Intel is basically hoping their Processors last until the warranty expires.
The latest microcode is a mitigation only and they have no idea how to handle the situation without losing a lot of money.

 

[stimpy88]

I like tech yes city, haven't watched the whole thing yet, just from your time stamp. But.... Just curious.... if you disabled a bunch of cores and don't change iccmax.., Would that mean more current per core? I've wondered if my first failure was because of too much current. My voltage was low but I used throttlestop which default puts iccmax to its max and at the time I didn't even know what that meant so I didn't change it even though now intel says its a big no-no.

I noticed recommended iccmax from intel for 13700k and 14700k was the same but thats just one ecore cluster.... What about 4 ecore clusters disabled and iccmax not changed, is that... dangerous? Again I don't know maybe he changed it earlier or I got it all wrong. Just something I've been wondering for a while.

Anyway... goodnight.

It's not the current that's killing these CPU's, it's the voltage.

 

[iameatingjam]

It's not the current that's killing these CPU's, it's the voltage.

I get thats a factor. But its likely there's more than one. My voltage on that first chip was very low due to my undervolts/plus it seemed like a good bin, before it died anyway. Just transients I guess, or oxidation? Who knows? But that 511 iccmax has been one more bug in my ear about the whole thing. Intels power guidance sheet says very clearly, even for the best skus 'Never exceed 400'

 

[matar]

This is why I chose the i9-12900KS a few months ago as an upgrade instead of the 14-13 , luckily I had just learned of that issue before upgrading

 

[iameatingjam]

Oh, I get it now. Elevated voltages must have a reason, in some meeting someone said, let's use x.xx V. Probably based on some data from an engineer, who based his testing on something else, using parameters provided by someone else .. at some end of the reason chain is a human who made a mistake, certainly not intentional. This is probably not what everyone wants to hear though

Um, okay. But anyway, do you really think the article should be saying "Intel's analysis shows that the root cause of stability problems is caused by too high voltage during operation of the processor" when intel seems to be twisting themselves into pretzels to not say that directly.

They've said elevated voltages can cause instability.

They've said they're releasing a microcode patch to fix the root cause of said elevated voltage.

But putting these two together != "the root cause of stability problems is caused by too high voltage"

 

[Gradius2]

While not that bad, THIS is my 14700KF @ 1.33V

Validator:

Intel Core i7 14700KF @ 5600 MHz - CPU-Z VALIDATOR

[qsscee] Validated Dump by Gradius (2024-08-21 12:24:04) - MB: MSI MPG Z690 EDGE WIFI DDR4 (MS-7D31) - RAM: 32768 MB

valid.x86.fr

 

[persizi]

I would suggest, leave everything on default (Intel Defaults), Disable the IA CEP and set a minimum AC LL where CB R15 v15.0.3.7 doesn't crash. This must be done at the default limits, i.e. PL 253W and iccmax 307A for i7 and i9.

The CB version is very important, v15.0.3.7 is way better than 15.0.3.8 for stability purposes.

 

[iameatingjam]

I would suggest, leave everything on default (Intel Defaults), Disable the IA CEP and set a minimum AC LL where CB R15 v15.0.3.7 doesn't crash. This must be done at the default limits, i.e. PL 253W and iccmax 307A for i7 and i9.

The CB version is very important, v15.0.3.7 is way better than 15.0.3.8 for stability purposes.

You can't, turn cep off while on intel profile, the intel profile will override it, at least on gigabyte boards. BZ showed that in a recent video. And that totally explained to me why my pc was acting like cep was on when it was turned off. Also he convinced me its probably better to keep cep on like intel recommends.

 

[persizi]

You can't, turn cep off while on intel profile, the intel profile will override it, at least on gigabyte boards. BZ showed that in a recent video. And that totally explained to me why my pc was acting like cep was on when it was turned off.

Than you can use a different profile but have to set manually the limits i.e. PL 253W and iccmax 307A. I'm not convinced that the CEP should be enabled but everyone has different preferences.

 

[iameatingjam]

Than you can use a different profile but have to set manually the limits i.e. PL 253W and iccmax 307A. I'm not convinced that the CEP should be enabled but everyone has different preferences.

Yeah I'm not convinced either. Its pretty much a guessing game.

 

[P4-630]

Intel Core 13/14th Gen Instability Update - Future Products Unaffected + Current Gen Product Updates

*9/25/24 - Please go to the following link for the latest updates: Intel Core 13th and 14th Gen Desktop Processor Vmin Instability Issue Root Cause* Intel is sharing a few important updates on the Intel® Core™ 13th and 14th Gen desktop processor Vmin Shift Instability issue investigation...

community.intel.com