Around the 10th gen or so, Intel seems to be juicing up their cpus in order to look competitive with Ryzen cpus.

And Intel has done this sort of thing in the past, just not to the extent of what is going on now.

This problem has just gotten way worse since. The current 13th/14th gen cpus will be degraded at stock settings because Intel has ridiculously high power limits. The default limits are already very high and the 'extreme' ICCmax for 150W TDP 13th/14th gen cpus is 400A is clearly crazy high. The average pc builder or gamer is not going to know that leaving the settings at default will degrade their cpus permanently in a few short months.

Recently Nvidia pushed back by telling users with Raptor Lake cpus to contact Intel after getting "out of video memory" errors.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/...t-intel-support
And even worse, it looks like the Raptor Lake cpus have degraded in a few months to a point where crashing occurs.
https://www.lowyat.net/2024/320284/gamers-r...-cpus-en-masse/

Sad to see how Intel sunk to to the level where they are putting the blame on mobo manufacturers for not enforcing limits LOWER than their own specs for long term reliability.

The 14700 is not a bad cpu, its just that Intel wants to win and be no. 1 at everything at any cost it seems. Lowering the PL1/PL2/Icc is not going destroy performance, its still going to be good and generate alot less heat.

Whether or not the i9 is overpowered for games is beside the point. The user might be using for other programs other than games.
There are more reports that 13th and 14th gen get degraded from the factory settings even under normal use.
"However, despite all the power they wield, gamers in South Korea were returning them en masse, all because of a problem arising through the fighting game Tekken 8......
Other reports point to a combination of a 13900K or 14900K with and the top-tier RTX 4090 inducing crashes in-game, just a few months after being assembled or paired together."

I wasn't referring to to THW about the official power limit. Intel's early review sample NDA document said >253W for PL1/PL2 and about 400A for icc-max for their 'extreme profile'. Even the default 253W stock limit seems to be in overclocking territory for 125W tdp chips.

There is way too many reports of instability/chips degraded for 13/14th gen cpus, and some of them happening even after setting stock Intel power limits.
The Zen 4 cpus seems to do better in apps other than gaming but the big difference is in long term stability and reliability. Being abit slower is a ton better than unusable unstable cpu thats prematurely degraded.

Intel's current problems are alot more serious than the teething problems AMD had with Ryzen. The early Ryzens had memory incompatibility/instability with took some bios updates to resolve. The 5000 series had the USB dropout issue. Now Intel probably has more memory incompatibility/instability issues than Ryzen putting aside the problems with voltage/power.

Someone at chiphell took the time to organise testing of hundreds of intel 13/14th gen cpus and found very poor stability at auto out of the box settings. If 5/10 13th gen and 2/10 14th gen managed to pass, its a clear sign that its complete garbage and not just a few bad apples.
https://wccftech.com/only-5-out-of-10-core-...ability-issues/

Performance takes a hit as expected with Intels baseline bios fix - "This is reported to be up to -30% in multi-threaded applications and up to -15% in games which is quite big".
Hardware unboxed ran gaming benchmarks with the new bios fix and the performance hit was 10%-20%. IIRC 20% was the perf hit for low 1% fps.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdF5erDRO-c&t=520s


And then you have to consider Intel's current issues with the Meltdown bug. The last downfall patch supposedly had a big performance hit on older cpus, up to 39%.

This post has been edited by imbibug: May 4 2024, 11:33 PM