Intel Motherboard Voltage and Power Settings Guide
By default, many motherboard manufacturers stray from the voltage and power guidelines set by intel for extra performance or stability. This however, results in higher thermals and less efficiency.
Following are some quick settings you need to change, or toggle generally and based on the motherboard manufacturer.
General
13th Gen Intel
- Set Long Duration Package Power Limit (P1), which defines the maximum wattage the CPU is allowed to run when under sustained loads. By default, this is set to 4095W (unlimited), whereas Intel's spec is 125W for the new 13th Gen CPUs.
- Set Short Duration Package Power Limit (P2), which is similar to the P1 power limit, but is a secondary wattage that the CPU is allowed to hit for short bursts. By default, this is set to 4095W (unlimited), whereas Intel's spec is either 181W (13600K) or 253W (13700K/13900K)
ASUS
- Disable Multi-Core Enhancement (MCE), which allows the CPU to run at the maximum turbo frequency on all cores, regardless of how many cores are in use. Typically, the boost frequency varies based on how many cores are being used.
ASRock
- Set Load Line Calibration (LLC) to the lowest voltage option that is stable.
How Thermals & Performance are affected, BIOS Defaults vs Intel Spec
Performance Impacts
The biggest performance impact these overclock settings tend to make is on highly threaded workloads. The biggest difference was Cinebench which had about a 20% performance swing, while others were closer to 10-15%. For the rest of the workloads (photo and video editing), performance was largely unchanged.
Thermal Impacts
In exchange for a worst-case 10% drop in performance in highly threaded tasks (usually not indicative of real-life performance), we see around a 30-40C drop in CPU temperature. Whether that is worth the tradeoff is going to be something people will have to decide for themselves. We tend to lean towards stability and reliability over performance, but if you are comfortable with your CPU hitting 100C during these kinds of loads, it is also perfectly fine to go in that direction.
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