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New reports suggest that Intel Z890 motherboards will come with Intel baseline power settings enabled by default, to avoid a recurrence of the instability issues that have plagued Intel’s 14th-gen CPUs. It’s unclear if Intel or motherboard makers are behind this, but it follows Intel’s push to make safer power settings the default option on existing boards earlier this year.
It seems this approach will carry over to the first Intel Arrow Lake motherboards, helping Intel CPUs stay within the company’s official power limits. Intel faced initial criticism earlier this year when it blamed problems with Intel’s Raptor Lake CPUs on motherboard manufacturers for running CPUs with voltages well above the default settings. The best gaming motherboards out there all offer settings for configuring your CPU power settings, but if these rumors are true, then Intel could be looking to take a much tighter grip over the default power settings for its next-gen lineup to avoid repeating the disaster.
The report by Taiwanese hardware website BenchLife.info suggests that motherboard manufacturers will ship with Intel’s baseline settings as the default option. This change will apparently only apply to the default out-of-the-box settings, though, with motherboard manufacturers still free to offer performance profiles that users can adjust themselves.
In the past, manufacturers had more freedom in configuring these default settings, often opting for higher voltage settings that allowed CPUs to reach higher frequencies more often, improving performance in the process. If Intel is taking more control over this process (and for now, this is still very much unconfirmed), then this benefits consumers.
Let’s look at it this way. With these defaults, your CPU may run with more conservative voltage settings, and won’t boost to higher frequencies as often, but it will have a lower risk of failure. A small reduction in performance is a good price to pay to avoid your CPU destroying itself. If you’re an enthusiast running a Core i9 14900K, for instance, then Intel’s new power settings aren’t preventing you from running your CPU with a higher-risk configuration. You’ll just have to enable that configuration for yourself.
Based on what we saw with Intel’s Raptor Lake CPUs, these settings will enable some features by default that should help to reduce some of the risks, such as Current Excursion Protection (CEP), which monitors the CPU’s power usage under load. If it breaches the threshold, then the processor will automatically throttle back to prevent damage.
Running an overvolted CPU on your motherboard isn’t inherently problematic if you take the right precautions. However, after a year of controversy, it looks like Intel’s own tolerance for failures is a lot lower. The issue with Raptor Lake CPUs stemmed from excessive voltage fluctuations, with the voltage spiking too highly and sometimes causing irreparable damage. Intel attributed this “Vmin Shift Instability” to a microcode error, but it still strongly advises sticking to the default power settings it provides.
If this rumor is true, then it makes sense for Intel to insist on a baseline default profile across all manufacturers that the company can control itself. Hopefully, this will help Intel avoid another crisis, especially now there’s an Intel CPU fix out there for existing boards. Thankfully, Intel does claim that Arrow Lake stability won’t be affected by the earlier Vmin Shift Instability problems, so newer CPUs should be safer.
Motherboard makers are already providing BIOS updates for Z790 boards with the new Intel Default Settings profile included, but you’ll have to download and flash these to your existing board yourself. If you’re running an Intel board and you’ve not applied the fix yet, you might want to learn how to flash your BIOS next, which will take you through each step. You can also check out our Intel Arrow Lake guide for all of the details about Intel’s new CPU lineup.
