The controversy surrounding Intel’s failing 13th and 14th Gen processors has reached its climax. Board partners have released a “Baseline” profile with their latest firmware update, setting these chips to the Intel power spec. We had similar problems with our Core i9-13900KF which had to be RMA’d for a replacement. The performance drop associated with Intel’s Baseline Profile is well-known (even with budget B760 motherboards), but the non-K “locked” CPUs are hit even harder.
Intel non-K CPUs are Much Slower with Official PL1/PL2 Power Limits
ASUS automatically sets the Core i9-14900K/13900K and the i7-14700K/13700K to an “unlimited” PL2 (boost) power limit. The remaining K and non-K chips are also set to an “unlimited” PL1 (base) power limit. Since the Intel official spec for the non-K parts is much lower than their K-series counterparts, the performance hit is understandably worse too.
Testing conducted by Quasarzone shows that the Core i9-14900 and the i7-14700 are up to ~40% slower than stock when using the Intel Baseline profile (on ASUS motherboards). The i9-14900 drops from 39.4K to 24.6K points in the Cinebench R23 multi-core benchmark. The Core i7-14700 sees a decline of 32-33% (34,352 to 23,091 points) using the Baseline settings.
The performance hit is more pronounced on the higher-end SKUs as they are more power-bound out of the box. The 24-core i9-14900 will always decline more than the 10-core i5-14400 in multi-threaded workloads, as it needs more power to keep all 24 cores fed. Luckily, the single-core and gaming performance is less affected, so the average user doesn’t need to worry about all this. In the future, Intel CPUs will be disadvantaged against their AMD rivals in rendering and other content creation benchmarks.
