Intel Asks Board Partners to Set “Intel Baseline” Power Limits as the Default by 31st May

Intel has asked its board partners to provide customers with the “Intel Baseline” power limits, with the suggested profile name “Intel Default Settings.” These BIOS settings limit the boost power limits to 253W (unlimited by default) on the higher-end K-series CPUs and 188W or lower on the remaining SKUs. Of course, there comes a sizable performance decrease with these “baseline” specs but Intel doesn’t seem bothered.

Inte Power Profiles: Baseline, Performance & Extreme

Most mainstream workloads including gaming and light content creation don’t take much of a performance hit. This is likely why Intel decided to move ahead with this decision even though it may not fix the rampant 13th Gen/14th Gen K-series RMAs. To make matters worse, Intel defines three different power profiles in official documentation, including “Baseline,” “Performance,” and “Extreme.”

The Baseline profile has a “PL2” boost power limit of 188W, while Performance and Extreme set it to 253W. The Extreme profile also sets the PL1 value equal to PL2 (253W), increasing the Iccmax to 400A (from 249A at Baseline and 307A at Performance). The PL4 (absolute max power limit) is set to 293W at Baseline and 380W at Performance/Extreme.

Intel hasn’t clarified which power profile board partners are supposed to adhere to which as you can expect is causing irregularities. Most notably, Gigabyte’s latest firmware update uses the Baseline profile, while ASUS enforces the Extreme and Performance power limits.

Arrow Lake-S and the Intel Baseline Profile

Meanwhile, Intel’s Arrow Lake-S desktop processors report decent results compared to the Core i9-14900K Baseline performance. The 15th Gen/Core Ultra series 2 CPUs will reduce the PL2 and PL4 limits to 177W and 300W, respectively. And with the “Intel Default” profile on the 13th/14th Gen chips, Arrow Lake should post fairly satisfying numbers.

Further reading:

• Intel 15th Gen Arrow Lake-S CPU Specs Leak Out: 24 Cores, no Hyper-Threading, and 125W TDP

Sources: HXL, Benchlife.