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Note: This thread mostly contains the investigation and explanation for the higher power draw on the latest BIOS versions.
It doesn't go so much into detail about the solution, which can be found in my Guide: How to set good power limits in the BIOS and reduce the CPU power draw.
A lot of people have reported higher CPU temperatures after updating to the latest BIOS version for their 600-/700-series Intel board. Especially after updating to the version containing the 0x129 microcode revision (hotfix for the voltage spike problem with the true 13th/14th gen CPUs), or newer versions.
Now, right from the start, the logical explanation for a higher power draw (when applying the same workload, and if the power limits don't mask anything) would be a higher voltage. But what exactly is causing the higher voltage, which is leading to higher power draw, leading to more heat, leading to higher temperatures?
The hot candidate is "CPU Lite Load", which influences the the CPU voltage via the so-called AC and DC loadlines. The important one is the AC loadline, a voltage added by the BIOS to make up for electrical properties of the CPU socket and such. The background is not so important to understand, the main thing is, the higher this value is, the more voltage is added. This not only takes into account the electrical properties of the board and the CPU socket, it also can make really bad CPU samples run stable (when set appropriately by default), or it can make CPUs be unstable from factory (if set too low by default). Finally, if set too high by default, it will make the CPUs draw too much power and run too hot.
But by what mechanism is there now more voltage added for the CPU? Does MSI choose a higher default mode for CPU Lite Load, and why? I wanted to find out, and since the stable BIOS with the 0x129 microcode just came out for my board model (at the time of writing this), i put it to the test. Now, i am using an i5-13500, so, not a true "Raptor Lake" CPU like a 13600K or 14600K for example (which are definitely affected by the microcode bugs), but an "Alder Lake" 12th-gen-based one. So, it being a 12th gen in disguise, it actually neither needs (nor uses) the newer microcode, it uses Alder Lake microcode instead. But still, i wanted to see if my CPU's voltage and thus power draw also go up.
So, on the old/previous BIOS version, i had CPU Lite Load optimized to Mode 4 for my specific CPU.
This means, Mode 4 is stable for that CPU, with a bit of stability headroom (Mode 3 was verified stable, then i raised it by one step).
First, taking some baseline numbers. The default for "CPU Lite Load" - with my CPU and my board, on the older BIOS version 7D32v1H - was Mode 12:
Click to enlarge
I did some other optimizations there, like enabling all power-saving mechanisms plus Intel Speed Shift Technology. Most of that only lowers idle power draw though.
Then, updating to 7D32v1J:
After the update, here's the revised cooler selection screen, which is really the power limit selection screen:
I chose the middle option, even though i already knew that - with my cooler and CPU - i would not even reach the middle option's limits. So i also could've chosen the bottom option with the maxed out limits, wouldn't matter in my case. My cooler can easily deal with my CPU's heat, so i could optimize the fan curves for low noise output. But for most people, choosing the middle option "MSI Performance" is a good starting point, from which they can lower the power limits if necessary. Because "MSI Performance" includes the highest power limits that make sense to allow.
Note: The BIOS first has the values for the first option "Intel Default Settings" loaded. So after the middle option is selected, the menu under OC will still show the "Intel Default Settings" values, until you press F10 to save and exit, then the "MSI Performance Settings" are applied. But we know those three options are not that well-fitting for most people anyway, because everyone combines a different CPU with a different cooler. I just chose the middle option because it happens to have the maximum values i would allow for any CPU (even an i9). If there is any thermal throttling with those limits, they have to be optimized to the individual cooling capabilities, which i explain in my guide.
Now, after the update, we're on the new BIOS (the one with the 0x129 microcode). Let's check what the new default settings are. Remember, CPU Lite Load on Auto, in the old BIOS version, resulted in Mode 12. This was still quite high for my CPU, considering it was fully stable at Mode 4. So there's eight steps worth of additional voltage added to VCore, in order to make all CPUs of varying quality work.
Now on the new BIOS:
Blimey! The new default is Mode 18! I wonder what that will do to the voltages, the power draw, the heat and the temperatures? Nothing good, i can already tell you.
Of course, some other settings were also reset. I enabled them all again manually, but kept CPU Lite Load on Mode 18 for testing.
Now, about the testing, for Cinebench R15, i used Cinebench R15 15.0.37 with Extreme Edition mod, just to explain the oddly low scores for that.
For power draw testing, i mostly relied on an energy meter that's plugged in at the wall socket (actually, at the UPS), for the power cable going into the PSU. This energy meter / power draw measurement device is very exact and, unlike the sensors in the system, cannot be wrong. Additionally i took some measurements from the "CPU Package Power" sensor via HWinfo, which is the CPU-only power draw.
Here is the full comparison:
What can we see from this? All the scores stay basically the same, no matter which mode is active for CPU Lite Load. On some boards, for it to be like this, one would have to disable the "IA CEP Support" setting like i describe in my Guide: How to set good power limits in the BIOS and reduce the CPU power draw. On my board however, this setting is not available (as shown on the screenshots), and with my CPU and board combination, IA CEP clearly doesn't intervene, otherwise the scores would be cut in half with CPU Lite Load Mode 4. But they all stay almost identical within the margin of error.
So, the performance stays the same, but what about the power draw? On the old BIOS, using the default Mode 12 is already quite inefficient. Power draw can be a few dozen Watts higher than it would need to be for this CPU, due to higher-than-necessary Vcore that's applied by Mode 12. So optimizing this setting down to what the CPU actually needs for full stability (in my case, eight steps down to Mode 4) pays off nicely. Everything about how the CPU is running improves, and the scores stay the same. If my CPU was actually hitting a power/temperature limit, then the scores would even improve with Mode 4, because compared to Mode 12, the "power/temperature budget" simply lasts longer, and the CPU can clock higher within those limits.
But now look what happens on the new BIOS, MSI have a new default of Mode 18. This is a catastrophy, now my CPU is not just running eight steps above what it would need for full stability, it's running 14 steps above it! We're seeing 30-50W higher power draw (CPU only, for the whole PC it's up to 90W more) than necessary, and that's just on my lowly i5-13500. On an i7 or i9, the difference would be tremendous, because there are more cores and higher frequencies. And of course, the scores stay the same, the stability stays the same (there is no "more stable than stable"), but everything else has worsened considerably!
So this explains how the temperatures can be so much higher on the latest BIOS versions: The mode for CPU Lite Load has been raised considerably by default. Because it looks like what MSI is doing now is, they're adding a huge safety headroom for the default CPU voltage, most likely in an attempt to stabilize certain CPUs that have already degraded and have a bit of instability.
Their rationale might be, now that there's a voltage limit in place to take care of the voltage spikes, they can happily raise the default voltage (via a higher default CPU Lite Load mode) to stabilize shaky/unstable CPUs, basically the victims of the voltage spike bugs in the microcode. And that actually works for those CPUs that suffered degradation. But for everyone else with a stable CPU, this makes everything a lot worse!
So it has become even more important to try and lower the voltage, otherwise a stable CPU will have needlessly high power draw in all load states, effectively lowering the power and temperature budget and ultimately costing performance. This becomes evident due to instantly improved performance as soon as you undervolt (provided the CPU is hitting a power/temperature limit, which most 14th gen i7/i9 will do unless your cooling is out of this world).
Once you go by my guide, then any higher temperatures can be completely taken care of, because in step 1) you set safe power limits for your cooling, and in step 2) the voltage will be lowered to what your CPU sample actually requires (plus a bit of headroom). This is literally all that is required to bring down the temperatures, either to the level of the older BIOS version when those things were already optimized, or to a better level than ever before if they weren't.
Note: If you undervolted with an offset before (instead of lowering CPU Lite Load), or a combination of the two methods, then the offset undervolt will now happen from a higher baseline voltage. So the best thing in that case is to take note of the previous mode for CPU Lite Load, and apply it again on the new BIOS. The default mode in the newest BIOS version is crazy high! I don't know what they're thinking. Well, i have an idea, but i don't think they're doing anything good by this. For the vast majority of users, the CPU will run worse than before. Going by my guide linked at the very top, this can luckily be reversed.
To round this off, let's look at the "calculation efficiency" of the system in Cinebench R23 with different settings (higher is better):
Old default, CPU Lite Load 12: 119 points per Watt.
New default, CPU Lite Load 18: 100 points per Watt.
Optimized CPU Lite Load Mode 4: 145 points per Watt!
Mode 12 wasn't very efficient to begin with, and the new Mode 18 is just horribly inefficient.
Mode 4, which is still fully stable with my CPU and achieves the same performance, has much higher efficiency.
Lastly, on the far right of the table, i did an additional test, checking the benefits of setting CPU Lite Load to Advanced (using the same AC loadline setting that Mode 4 results in), but optimizing the DC loadline setting so the VID matches the Vcore under full load. In CPU Lite Load Advanced, you can select values for AC and DC Loadline seperately, without having some preset combination which can have the wrong DC Loadline value. So now you can set the DC Loadline so it results in the correct power draw numbers. Doing that involves using HWinfo Sensors, creating full CPU load, then looking at the CPU's VID requests (in the "current values" column), which is the voltage the CPU asks for from the board, and comparing it to the current VCore value. If those are near-identical, the correct DC Loadline value has been found.
I have done this, and the result for my CPU on my board was AC loadline 30, DC loadline 117, which can also be read out in HWinfo later:
The concerns about CPU Lite Load "Normal" (that it won't always show the correct CPU Package Power anymore because the DC loadline is usually not properly adjusted to where it would need to be) are somewhat put into perspective. We have a mere 6W difference from the reported CPU power draw to the "actual" CPU power draw, under the highest load any normal program can create (CB 23 is fully multithreaded AVX load, but Prime95 uses dirty tricks, it's only used for stability testing). This is not gonna make or break out power limits, if we have had to set some.
And even with the reported power draw being slightly off like this on CPU Lite Load "Normal", this doesn't affect us much, we can just go by the maximum CPU temperature to inform us if our power limits are properly dialed in, or if we still need to adjust them according to our cooling. Plus, explaining CPU Lite Load "Advanced" makes it more complicated, which means less people will do it. So i think CPU Lite Load "Normal" is a good compromise.
By the way, this is what resistance/impedance in mΩ (milliOhm) the different CPU Lite Load settings correspond to, valid for both old and new BIOS versions:
CPU Lite Load Normal, Mode 4: AC loadline 0.3 mΩ, DC loadline 0.3 mΩ (this is what i lowered the mode to, verifying that it's stable)
CPU Lite Load Normal, Mode 12: AC loadline 1.1 mΩ, DC loadline 1.1 mΩ (this is the default on the older BIOS versions)
CPU Lite Load Normal, Mode 18: AC loadline 1.7 mΩ, DC loadline 1.7 mΩ (this is the way too high default on the latest BIOS version)
CPU Lite Load Advanced, AC 30 / DC 117: AC loadline 0.3 mΩ, DC loadline 1.17 mΩ (so this way you can set them both directly).
Note: It's possible that some other board/CPU combinations have somewhat different values for a certain mode. They can be read out in HWinfo, as shown above.
Conclusion:
The explanation for the higher temperatures is very simple: Needlessly raised default mode for "CPU Lite Load", causing higher voltage.
Never has it been more important to optimize each Intel CPU in each system individually, according to the cooling and according to what voltage it's running stable with. On the default settings of the latest BIOS versions, the voltage / power draw / heat / temperatures (one influences the next) are higher than ever! With any CPU that is running into power/temperature limits (so, either power limits that you have set to protect your cooling, or failing to do that, the thermal throttling that can happen), the performance will decrease as a result of the new BIOS defaults!
Luckily, with the help of my guide, all those parameters can be improved again: Voltage down, power draw down, heat down, temperatures down, performance identical or up!
This has no downsides other than investing some time for finding good values and testing that it stays stable. Your CPU and your cooling will be very thankful for that effort.
It doesn't go so much into detail about the solution, which can be found in my Guide: How to set good power limits in the BIOS and reduce the CPU power draw.
A lot of people have reported higher CPU temperatures after updating to the latest BIOS version for their 600-/700-series Intel board. Especially after updating to the version containing the 0x129 microcode revision (hotfix for the voltage spike problem with the true 13th/14th gen CPUs), or newer versions.
Now, right from the start, the logical explanation for a higher power draw (when applying the same workload, and if the power limits don't mask anything) would be a higher voltage. But what exactly is causing the higher voltage, which is leading to higher power draw, leading to more heat, leading to higher temperatures?
The hot candidate is "CPU Lite Load", which influences the the CPU voltage via the so-called AC and DC loadlines. The important one is the AC loadline, a voltage added by the BIOS to make up for electrical properties of the CPU socket and such. The background is not so important to understand, the main thing is, the higher this value is, the more voltage is added. This not only takes into account the electrical properties of the board and the CPU socket, it also can make really bad CPU samples run stable (when set appropriately by default), or it can make CPUs be unstable from factory (if set too low by default). Finally, if set too high by default, it will make the CPUs draw too much power and run too hot.
But by what mechanism is there now more voltage added for the CPU? Does MSI choose a higher default mode for CPU Lite Load, and why? I wanted to find out, and since the stable BIOS with the 0x129 microcode just came out for my board model (at the time of writing this), i put it to the test. Now, i am using an i5-13500, so, not a true "Raptor Lake" CPU like a 13600K or 14600K for example (which are definitely affected by the microcode bugs), but an "Alder Lake" 12th-gen-based one. So, it being a 12th gen in disguise, it actually neither needs (nor uses) the newer microcode, it uses Alder Lake microcode instead. But still, i wanted to see if my CPU's voltage and thus power draw also go up.
So, on the old/previous BIOS version, i had CPU Lite Load optimized to Mode 4 for my specific CPU.
This means, Mode 4 is stable for that CPU, with a bit of stability headroom (Mode 3 was verified stable, then i raised it by one step).
First, taking some baseline numbers. The default for "CPU Lite Load" - with my CPU and my board, on the older BIOS version 7D32v1H - was Mode 12:
Click to enlarge
I did some other optimizations there, like enabling all power-saving mechanisms plus Intel Speed Shift Technology. Most of that only lowers idle power draw though.
Then, updating to 7D32v1J:
After the update, here's the revised cooler selection screen, which is really the power limit selection screen:
I chose the middle option, even though i already knew that - with my cooler and CPU - i would not even reach the middle option's limits. So i also could've chosen the bottom option with the maxed out limits, wouldn't matter in my case. My cooler can easily deal with my CPU's heat, so i could optimize the fan curves for low noise output. But for most people, choosing the middle option "MSI Performance" is a good starting point, from which they can lower the power limits if necessary. Because "MSI Performance" includes the highest power limits that make sense to allow.
Note: The BIOS first has the values for the first option "Intel Default Settings" loaded. So after the middle option is selected, the menu under OC will still show the "Intel Default Settings" values, until you press F10 to save and exit, then the "MSI Performance Settings" are applied. But we know those three options are not that well-fitting for most people anyway, because everyone combines a different CPU with a different cooler. I just chose the middle option because it happens to have the maximum values i would allow for any CPU (even an i9). If there is any thermal throttling with those limits, they have to be optimized to the individual cooling capabilities, which i explain in my guide.
Now, after the update, we're on the new BIOS (the one with the 0x129 microcode). Let's check what the new default settings are. Remember, CPU Lite Load on Auto, in the old BIOS version, resulted in Mode 12. This was still quite high for my CPU, considering it was fully stable at Mode 4. So there's eight steps worth of additional voltage added to VCore, in order to make all CPUs of varying quality work.
Now on the new BIOS:
Blimey! The new default is Mode 18! I wonder what that will do to the voltages, the power draw, the heat and the temperatures? Nothing good, i can already tell you.
Of course, some other settings were also reset. I enabled them all again manually, but kept CPU Lite Load on Mode 18 for testing.
Now, about the testing, for Cinebench R15, i used Cinebench R15 15.0.37 with Extreme Edition mod, just to explain the oddly low scores for that.
For power draw testing, i mostly relied on an energy meter that's plugged in at the wall socket (actually, at the UPS), for the power cable going into the PSU. This energy meter / power draw measurement device is very exact and, unlike the sensors in the system, cannot be wrong. Additionally i took some measurements from the "CPU Package Power" sensor via HWinfo, which is the CPU-only power draw.
Here is the full comparison:
What can we see from this? All the scores stay basically the same, no matter which mode is active for CPU Lite Load. On some boards, for it to be like this, one would have to disable the "IA CEP Support" setting like i describe in my Guide: How to set good power limits in the BIOS and reduce the CPU power draw. On my board however, this setting is not available (as shown on the screenshots), and with my CPU and board combination, IA CEP clearly doesn't intervene, otherwise the scores would be cut in half with CPU Lite Load Mode 4. But they all stay almost identical within the margin of error.
So, the performance stays the same, but what about the power draw? On the old BIOS, using the default Mode 12 is already quite inefficient. Power draw can be a few dozen Watts higher than it would need to be for this CPU, due to higher-than-necessary Vcore that's applied by Mode 12. So optimizing this setting down to what the CPU actually needs for full stability (in my case, eight steps down to Mode 4) pays off nicely. Everything about how the CPU is running improves, and the scores stay the same. If my CPU was actually hitting a power/temperature limit, then the scores would even improve with Mode 4, because compared to Mode 12, the "power/temperature budget" simply lasts longer, and the CPU can clock higher within those limits.
But now look what happens on the new BIOS, MSI have a new default of Mode 18. This is a catastrophy, now my CPU is not just running eight steps above what it would need for full stability, it's running 14 steps above it! We're seeing 30-50W higher power draw (CPU only, for the whole PC it's up to 90W more) than necessary, and that's just on my lowly i5-13500. On an i7 or i9, the difference would be tremendous, because there are more cores and higher frequencies. And of course, the scores stay the same, the stability stays the same (there is no "more stable than stable"), but everything else has worsened considerably!
So this explains how the temperatures can be so much higher on the latest BIOS versions: The mode for CPU Lite Load has been raised considerably by default. Because it looks like what MSI is doing now is, they're adding a huge safety headroom for the default CPU voltage, most likely in an attempt to stabilize certain CPUs that have already degraded and have a bit of instability.
Their rationale might be, now that there's a voltage limit in place to take care of the voltage spikes, they can happily raise the default voltage (via a higher default CPU Lite Load mode) to stabilize shaky/unstable CPUs, basically the victims of the voltage spike bugs in the microcode. And that actually works for those CPUs that suffered degradation. But for everyone else with a stable CPU, this makes everything a lot worse!
So it has become even more important to try and lower the voltage, otherwise a stable CPU will have needlessly high power draw in all load states, effectively lowering the power and temperature budget and ultimately costing performance. This becomes evident due to instantly improved performance as soon as you undervolt (provided the CPU is hitting a power/temperature limit, which most 14th gen i7/i9 will do unless your cooling is out of this world).
Once you go by my guide, then any higher temperatures can be completely taken care of, because in step 1) you set safe power limits for your cooling, and in step 2) the voltage will be lowered to what your CPU sample actually requires (plus a bit of headroom). This is literally all that is required to bring down the temperatures, either to the level of the older BIOS version when those things were already optimized, or to a better level than ever before if they weren't.
Note: If you undervolted with an offset before (instead of lowering CPU Lite Load), or a combination of the two methods, then the offset undervolt will now happen from a higher baseline voltage. So the best thing in that case is to take note of the previous mode for CPU Lite Load, and apply it again on the new BIOS. The default mode in the newest BIOS version is crazy high! I don't know what they're thinking. Well, i have an idea, but i don't think they're doing anything good by this. For the vast majority of users, the CPU will run worse than before. Going by my guide linked at the very top, this can luckily be reversed.
To round this off, let's look at the "calculation efficiency" of the system in Cinebench R23 with different settings (higher is better):
Old default, CPU Lite Load 12: 119 points per Watt.
New default, CPU Lite Load 18: 100 points per Watt.
Optimized CPU Lite Load Mode 4: 145 points per Watt!
Mode 12 wasn't very efficient to begin with, and the new Mode 18 is just horribly inefficient.
Mode 4, which is still fully stable with my CPU and achieves the same performance, has much higher efficiency.
Lastly, on the far right of the table, i did an additional test, checking the benefits of setting CPU Lite Load to Advanced (using the same AC loadline setting that Mode 4 results in), but optimizing the DC loadline setting so the VID matches the Vcore under full load. In CPU Lite Load Advanced, you can select values for AC and DC Loadline seperately, without having some preset combination which can have the wrong DC Loadline value. So now you can set the DC Loadline so it results in the correct power draw numbers. Doing that involves using HWinfo Sensors, creating full CPU load, then looking at the CPU's VID requests (in the "current values" column), which is the voltage the CPU asks for from the board, and comparing it to the current VCore value. If those are near-identical, the correct DC Loadline value has been found.
I have done this, and the result for my CPU on my board was AC loadline 30, DC loadline 117, which can also be read out in HWinfo later:
The concerns about CPU Lite Load "Normal" (that it won't always show the correct CPU Package Power anymore because the DC loadline is usually not properly adjusted to where it would need to be) are somewhat put into perspective. We have a mere 6W difference from the reported CPU power draw to the "actual" CPU power draw, under the highest load any normal program can create (CB 23 is fully multithreaded AVX load, but Prime95 uses dirty tricks, it's only used for stability testing). This is not gonna make or break out power limits, if we have had to set some.
And even with the reported power draw being slightly off like this on CPU Lite Load "Normal", this doesn't affect us much, we can just go by the maximum CPU temperature to inform us if our power limits are properly dialed in, or if we still need to adjust them according to our cooling. Plus, explaining CPU Lite Load "Advanced" makes it more complicated, which means less people will do it. So i think CPU Lite Load "Normal" is a good compromise.
By the way, this is what resistance/impedance in mΩ (milliOhm) the different CPU Lite Load settings correspond to, valid for both old and new BIOS versions:
CPU Lite Load Normal, Mode 4: AC loadline 0.3 mΩ, DC loadline 0.3 mΩ (this is what i lowered the mode to, verifying that it's stable)
CPU Lite Load Normal, Mode 12: AC loadline 1.1 mΩ, DC loadline 1.1 mΩ (this is the default on the older BIOS versions)
CPU Lite Load Normal, Mode 18: AC loadline 1.7 mΩ, DC loadline 1.7 mΩ (this is the way too high default on the latest BIOS version)
CPU Lite Load Advanced, AC 30 / DC 117: AC loadline 0.3 mΩ, DC loadline 1.17 mΩ (so this way you can set them both directly).
Note: It's possible that some other board/CPU combinations have somewhat different values for a certain mode. They can be read out in HWinfo, as shown above.
Conclusion:
The explanation for the higher temperatures is very simple: Needlessly raised default mode for "CPU Lite Load", causing higher voltage.
Never has it been more important to optimize each Intel CPU in each system individually, according to the cooling and according to what voltage it's running stable with. On the default settings of the latest BIOS versions, the voltage / power draw / heat / temperatures (one influences the next) are higher than ever! With any CPU that is running into power/temperature limits (so, either power limits that you have set to protect your cooling, or failing to do that, the thermal throttling that can happen), the performance will decrease as a result of the new BIOS defaults!
Luckily, with the help of my guide, all those parameters can be improved again: Voltage down, power draw down, heat down, temperatures down, performance identical or up!
This has no downsides other than investing some time for finding good values and testing that it stays stable. Your CPU and your cooling will be very thankful for that effort.
Last edited: