My game boost greyed out

[nbk_viper_tt157502e0]

My issue using:
MAG B760 tomahawk wifi DDR4 most recent bios as of 3/23/25
Intel i7 12700k
XMP profile 1 works fine.

The game boost is greyed out. It has been greyed out since I first purchased this motherboard. I have tried four different BIOS versions, but nothing seems to fix it.

 

[plutomate]

Maybe it has something to do with B chipset board. But all in all, you probably want to avoid that option whatsoever as modern CPU performance is likely maxed out by default, there is no need to push further.

 

[citay]

Rather than trying to use that badly made overclocking function, the best thing would be to go by my Guide: How to set good power limits in the BIOS and reduce the CPU power draw, it describes two steps to optimize how a CPU is running. Step 1), setting proper power limits for your system, and step 2) Lowering a setting called "CPU Lite Load", for huge benefits in lower voltage, lower power draw, less heat, and even higher performance within the power limits.

However, the B-series board prevents step 2) from having the best effect, because with that chipset you won't have the ability to disable a certain other setting "IA CEP Support" (or disabling it is not effective). You can - and should - lower "CPU Lite Load" a bit, but maybe only to Mode 11 or 12, not nearly as much as you potentially could on a Z-series board, where - with it all being fully effective - you'd only have upsides, and could gain even more performance.

If you were to use GameBoost instead, on Intel what that usually does is, it cancels out the normal boosting mechanisms as well as the intelligent power-saving mechanisms, instead it applies higher VCore for a fixed all-core OC, which is not how it should be done nowadays. While this OC can look a bit better in full multithreaded benchmarks, it will have more downsides than positives in daily use. The clocks will be kept high all the time for no reason, but with any kind of partial CPU load (which is far more common than full load on all cores), it may do worse than normal, because the normal boosting is prevented. And we haven't even gone into detail on how much the CPUs have been pushed from factory today already. The 12700K was still more decent than the successors in that it's not a total monster yet, but that's only if you don't try to push it much further yourself.

 

[nbk_viper_tt157502e0]

Rather than trying to use that badly made overclocking function, the best thing would be to go by my Guide: How to set good power limits in the BIOS and reduce the CPU power draw, it describes two steps to optimize how a CPU is running. Step 1), setting proper power limits for your system, and step 2) Lowering a setting called "CPU Lite Load", for huge benefits in lower voltage, lower power draw, less heat, and even higher performance within the power limits.

However, the B-series board prevents step 2) from having the best effect, because with that chipset you won't have the ability to disable a certain other setting "IA CEP Support" (or disabling it is not effective). You can - and should - lower "CPU Lite Load" a bit, but maybe only to Mode 11 or 12, not nearly as much as you potentially could on a Z-series board, where - with it all being fully effective - you'd only have upsides, and could gain even more performance.

If you were to use GameBoost instead, on Intel what that usually does is, it cancels out the normal boosting mechanisms as well as the intelligent power-saving mechanisms, instead it applies higher VCore for a fixed all-core OC, which is not how it should be done nowadays. While this OC can look a bit better in full multithreaded benchmarks, it will have more downsides than positives in daily use. The clocks will be kept high all the time for no reason, but with any kind of partial CPU load (which is far more common than full load on all cores), it may do worse than normal, because the normal boosting is prevented. And we haven't even gone into detail on how much the CPUs have been pushed from factory today already. The 12700K was still more decent than the successors in that it's not a total monster yet, but that's only if you don't try to push it much further yourself.

Thank you. After going through the OC menu in the bios, I set PL1:125(long duration) and PL2:190(short Duration) and CPU the P clocks to 50 and E clock 47. Then, I ran a few Heaven, Cinebench r23, and Timespy benchmarks. So far, it seems to be stable, with no artifacts or jitters/lag. I will test for the next 24 hours and get back to you.

thanks again

 

[citay]

Fixed all-core OC is really an outdated concept of the past. Nowadays, it's better to just let the CPU boost on its own and undervolt it, or if you want to OC no matter what, don't do it all-core, do it per-core (for example raising the P-core multi by one or two for each of the entries), and try to keep the voltage the same or even lower (depending on the quality of your CPU of course). Because you can use your CPU quality headroom in two directions: To OC, or to undervolt. Two sides of the same coin. If you want to OC, with today's highly pushed CPUs, it's best to go with a mild OC and then try to keep the voltage in the same ballpark. Rather than adding voltage, which quickly makes the power draw, temperatures and heat skyrocket. With a 13th/14th gen i7/i9, OC is pretty much out of the question for that very reason. 12th gen i7 is one of the last halfway sane ones (the 12900K already was too much).

Of course, if you set that low of a Long Duration power limit, the CPU will start to throttle after about a minute, because it wants to obey the power limits, which pretty much take precedence over anything else you set. I don't advise such a high delta between PL2 (Short) and PL1 (Long) values. Having a large delta, like you can see on the Intel defaults sometimes, that was mainly used for getting better benchmark numbers in the launch reviews if a benchmark can finish in under a minute. Usually it's better to not have to resort to such a huge difference. Remember, this step 1) is only about protecting your cooling, so it's enough if you keep the temperatures from being in the 90°s. So for example, you can try 190W short / 160W long power limits, something like that.