ASUS has to come to the rescue of its users who are facing crashing issues with Intel Core i9-14900K and 13900K Raptor Lake processors by issuing a BIOS update, currently being rolled out to Z790 motherboards. While the release note doesn’t explicitly say anything about fixing those issues, ASUS cleverly stated that the latest BIOS version "1202" includes an "Intel Baseline Profile option" to let users revert to the Intel factory default settings.
How can ASUS' "Intel Baseline" setting fix crashing issues in Intel 13th and 14th Gen i9 CPUs?
Intel Core i9-14900K is one of the best CPUs you can buy right now, but at the same time, those who bought it face various issues, ranging from the blue screen of death (BSOD) errors while playing games to rendering failures in video editing software. All these issues have also been reported by Intel Core i9-13900K CPU users.
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There was no easy solution available when users started reporting problems related to Intel 13th and 14th Gen processors. One of the workarounds that proved to work for many is limiting certain power management and optimization features by changing the SVID behavior to Intel's Fail Safe. In cases where crashes happened when playing games, downclocking the CPU improved the problems. But all that requires finding and manually tweaking those in the BIOS setting.
Now, what ASUS has introduced does pretty much the same thing, but unlike previously, spotting and changing those settings is a lot easier. After installing the latest BIOS on your Z790 motherboards, you get "Intel Baseline Profile" in the BIOS setting to run the CPU in the stock settings. And when you do that, you set your system to "minimum operational requirements, ensuring basic functionality without optimizations for performance." Long story short, the increased stability comes at the expense of performance.
How did Intel respond to the i9 crashes, and what's next?
Earlier this month, Intel told us it's investigating whether motherboards operating out of specification with the Intel Core i9-14900K are causing the crashing issues.
That investigation is still going on, with no official announcement from Intel regarding how the i9 crashing issues can be fixed. While updating BIOS can improve stability, doing so will prevent you from fully utilizing the true potential of your i9 CPUs. It remains to be seen whether Intel manages to fix it without limiting performance.