ASUS adds Baseline Profile settings to BIOS to limit processor speed in exchange for stability | 4Gamers

Some processors in Intel’s 12th and 13th generation are prone to abnormalities under high-performance conditions, causing games to jump out of memory errors or crash. In response, ASUS has urgently added “Baseline Profile” to the BIOS. Once turned on, processing will be restricted. The upper limit of power consumption and frequency of the host can be adjusted to ensure that the operation of the host becomes stable.

It is currently known that Intel’s 12th and 13th generation K series unlocked frequency multiplier processors, such as Core i9-13900K, Core i7-13700K, etc., may be damaged due to excessive load. It is speculated that this is related to Intel and the board. For the sake of performance, card manufacturers increase the voltage supplied to the processor from the motherboard to an extremely high 1.5 V, causing the processor to be slowly “electrocuted” over time.

In order to prevent the motherboard from providing excessive power to the processor, ASUS has added a new Baseline Profile to the BIOS. Once selected, the processor can be restored to Intel’s original factory settings and the automatic overclocking function added to the motherboard can be turned off. Higher stability.

However, the new BIOS also means that the performance of the processor is limited. According to the test of foreign media Hardware LUXX, after turning on the Baseline Profile setting on the ROG motherboard, there is no obvious difference in the single-core running score of CINEBENCH R23. , but the multi-core score dropped directly from 40848 points to 37197, and the performance shrank by about 9%.

In practical applications, the efficiency of Blender 3D calculations is reduced by about 9% after the Baseline Profile is turned on. Some games such as “F1 23”, “Tomb Raider: Shadow”, “Starry Sky”, etc. also have this effect2 % – 7% FPS value decline, but depending on the game design, there are a few games such as “Control” that are not affected by BIOS settings.

At the same time, because Baseline Profile limits the upward overclocking of the processor, the power consumption of the processor is locked at the TDP upper limit of 253 W, and the processor temperature is only 89 degrees Celsius. On the contrary, if the motherboard’s automatic overclocking is used, the power consumption It will be pulled to 316W and let the processor temperature reach 101 degrees Celsius, which triggers the protection mechanism.

Baseline Profile is designed to use Intel’s preset conservative parameters to protect the processor. In theory, it can reduce the chance of processor exceptions. However, as a result, the K-series processors, which were originally designed to be overclocked, lose the flexibility to add additional processors. Performance features.

Fortunately, Intel Baseline Profile will not use this as a basis for warranty judgment of processor damage, but in order to pursue stability, it is still a risk to obtain higher performance. This may be a choice for each user.