Good. Now, there's two things i would do.
1) Test which power limits you need to set for your cooling. As i said, because of the 14900K's outrageously high power draw when running without power limits in place, most people (even with high-end coolers) will have to - and should - set power limits for it, in order to prevent so-called thermal throttling. Thermal throttling is a mechanism that prevents the CPU from dying of overtemperature, it acts when approaching 100°C CPU temperature and tries save itself from overheating. But it's not good to rely on that, because if it comes to that and your cooling is already maxed out (fans at full speed, good airflow through the system), it means the CPU generates more heat than the cooler can get rid of, so thermal throttling has to step in to prevent the worst. In essence, it's an emergency mechanism, not something that should be able to happen for daily use. You want power limit throttling to step in before thermal throttling ever has to.
What you'd do is, you eyeball a number that your cooler might be able to handle comfortably (for your cooler you could set 250W for a test), you set those power limits in the BIOS, then you check how high the temperatures get under fully multithreaded load. If they are now in the mid-80°C range, that's good, you found your cooler's potential and you have some headroom left for higher ambient temperatures in the summer. If you still run into thermal throttling, you set the limits a bit lower.
To test the limits, you'd check your sensors with
HWinfo64 during a Cinebench run. Run it and open "Sensors", then expand all sensors by clicking on the little <--> arrows on the bottom, also expand the columns of the sensors a bit so everything can be read. Make it three big columns of sensors (or four, if the screen resolution is high enough). In the end, it should be a screenshot with all the sensors visible at once, like this:
Make sure your power plan in Windows is on "Balanced". Do nothing on the PC for a while (couple minutes), so the "minimum" baselines for the values are established. After that time in idle, then produce full CPU load with Cinebench (either
R23 or
R24, selecting the "CPU Multi" option), and after completing a 10 minute run, when the CPU temperatures have stabilized at the highest level, take a screenshot of the sensor window and tell me the Cinebench score. We shall see if the power limits are working well for your cooling or if they need adjusting.
If they're mid-80°C, perfect. Above 90°C, you should reduce the power limits, below 80°C you can raise them if you want, of course it also depends on the noise you want to tolerate, that has to do with the
fan curves. I would try to stay away from the 90°C range CPU temperatures under full load, because as mentioned, that slowly enters thermal throttling territory. It is not good to rely on that, and you want to have some headroom for higher ambient temperatures.
Even with 250W or slightly lower limits and at safe temperatures, you shouldn't lose much performance compared to unlimited. That is because above a certain power draw, the performance left to gain will be in the low- to mid-single-digits, but the power draw will rise pretty much exponentially. So these last performance gains are to be dismissed anyway, they are highly ineffective "junk performance". You are improving the calculation efficiency by limiting the power draw a bit, because there will be less energy spent for the job to finish.
How to set power limits? You go here in the BIOS and enter 250 for Long and Short duration power limit:
You can also set the other stuff like Intel C-State, C1E Support, Intel Speed Shift to Enabled. All that lowers power consumption in idle.
2) You can see i modified "CPU Lite Load" there too. That's a setting that has to be found out for each specific CPU by doing stability testing. By lowering it, you'd essentially shave off the generic headroom that MSI like to add on VCore (CPU core voltage) and adapt it to your specific CPU sample. This is a good way to lower power consumption in all load states. Check
this post and the one i linked there under the "CPU Lite Load" link. Furthermore, check
this post for some additional settings to lower the power consumption without any performance loss.
Now, an important step for this tuning is to check that the performance remains roughly the same as before. Because in that "Advanced CPU Configuration" in the BIOS, there might also be a setting called "IA CEP", which is the Current Excursion Protection mechanism for the IA cores (normal CPU cores). It wants to prevent any undercurrent or overcurrent from a narrow window that is expected for a CPU. Once it sees a break from the norm, it will work against it by also lowering performance a lot. With an active IA CEP, when using a lower "CPU Lite Load" mode, the performance can massively decrease, similar to
here, depending on the configuration. It then has to be disabled for the performance to get back to normal. This is ideally checked before fine-tuning the CPU Lite Load mode, because IA CEP [Enabled] would protect against any instability, since it would also slow down the CPU to a crawl, so in the end, any voltage is more than enough again. So if there is a performance loss from IA CEP [Enabled], for example a much lower Cinebench score all of a sudden, then you have to first disable IA CEP to remove this overprotective mechanism and actually shave off the VCore you want while maintaining stability. If IA CEP is not available as an option on your board, there's two possibilities, which you can't influence: Performance stays the same when you lower CPU Lite Load (good), or performance drops off a cliff once you lower CPU Lite Load by more than two or three steps or otherwise try to lower the core voltage (bad, it would severely limit the undervolting capabilities).
In my opinion, "CPU Lite Load" is one of the best undervolting methods on Intel MSI boards. That is basically the load line undervolting you're looking for. One thing about it though: The higher the CPU model, the less you can usually lower CPU Lite Load. Because the simple fact is, for the high frequencies of an i7/i9, you need a pretty high VCore (CPU core voltage) to be able to push it that high. So the safety margin that you can shave off using CPU Lite Load is smaller than on a mid-range CPU, which runs at turbo frequencies that are much more in the silicon's original comfort zone. If you can lower the CPU Lite Load on a i7/i9 by a couple modes, and it stays perfectly stable in stress tests, that would already be a decent improvement. On my i5-13500 meanwhile, i could go all the way down to Mode
3 4. But that's only because they are not pushing that model to the limit from factory, like they do on the i7/i9.
You need to verify the stability at each step (using
OCCT for example, or
Prime95 Small FFTs, around 20 minutes should be enough). Each step brings down VCore for all load states a bit, so then the CPU can clock higher at the same power draw, making the performance with full load at the power limit improve a little, and of course it will also save power in all load states below the power limit.
and the board, like my first, was MSI.