Intel released guidelines to its board partners regarding default BIOS settings to alleviate stability issues that some 13th and 14th Gen Core i9 CPU owners are experiencing. This began a few months ago with numerous reports of in-game instability in Unreal Engine 5 games. 

The new guidelines encompass recommended settings board makers should use to increase stability. However, Intel states that it’s not done investigating the root cause of the stability issues. It’s also careful to not blame its board partners for the aforementioned instability issues.

Intel’s guidelines feature of a graph showing a number of parameters it recommends its board partners apply by default. These settings include specific Intel technologies that should be turned on, voltage optimizations, and C-states.

Intel recommends Current Excursion Protection (CEP), Enhanced Thermal Velocity Boost, Thermal Velocity Boost, Thermal Velocity Boost Voltage Optimizations, and C-states all be enabled by default. The ICCMAX Unlimited Bit is recommended to be set to disabled by default, and TjMax offset is recommended to be set to 0.

The most contentious aspect of Intel’s recommenced settings is the power limits. For the ICCMax, ICCMax_App, and Power Limits, Intel does not state a specific wattage limit. Instead, it leaves these parameters to the board makers. However, it does state that the ICCMax setting should never exceed 400 amps. This is one of the things  a Tom’s Hardware GPU reviewer noticed with his particular Core i9-13900K processor.

The recommended settings show that Intel is not convinced unlimited power limits are the main issue. Presently, it seems like Intel is more concerned about other parameters that affect stability, including Current Excursion Protection and TVB Voltage Optimizations. One interesting tidbit is that Intel does provide an amperage limit on the ICCMax setting that’s much slower than the maximum 512 amps limit motherboard makers can use.

There are many theories on the instability problems, and many believe it comes down to the amount of power these chips can consume. Because Intel does not have strict guidelines on power consumption for its desktop processors, instead letting its board partners decide what power limits to give the processors. This has given Intel a reputation of late for having extremely hot and power-hungry chips, with its latest core i9 chips capable of drawing over 400W of power in the environment.

One major factor with these instability reports is that they don’t happen frequently, with only what appears to be a small subset of chips being affected. Apparently, the silicon lottery has become enough of an issue that certain chips on the affected end of the spectrum are influencing CPU stability even when users aren’t overclocking.

Intel is still working on the matter, and some of its board partners, such as Gigabyte, MSI and Asus have provided guides and/or BIOS updates to rectify 13th and 14th Generation stability issues on their boards. Now for the bad news, many of the fixes also negatively impact performance. Until Intel can provide a concrete solution, instability may continue to be a problem for certain chips.