I believe that many gamers have found that since Intel entered the LGA 1700 era, the CPU has been more restricted, and the addition of CEP (Converged Enhanced Power) function is one of them. When players feel that the CPU temperature and power consumption are high and want to reduce the CPU voltage, it is easy for the performance to drop as the voltage drops due to the CEP. At this time, players either have no choice but to use it according to the default settings, or pay more to use the CPU of the Z690/Z790 motherboard + K suffix model that supports CEP off. For this reason, how to disable CEP in low-to-mid-range configurations to make the CPU run more efficiently has become a problem that gamers have been concerned about for some time in the past.
At the beginning, some gamers tried to obtain a relatively relaxed CEP strategy by flashing in the original microcode that can recognize the 13th Gen Core CPU, and indeed succeeded in achieving a relatively good cooling and power reduction effect without losing performance. However, the process of flashing still has a certain degree of complexity, and the way to obtain the microcode can basically only be obtained through unofficial channels, which is still a bit troublesome for some players.
Later, some motherboard manufacturers began to provide the microcode switching function directly in the BIOS, and users only need to click the switching option slightly to achieve lossless voltage reduction. MSI also offers such a feature option for motherboards, and recently introduced a new CEP setting option for 14th Gen Core processors to support its B660/B760 and Z690/Z790 motherboards. However, this feature is currently only supported on 14th Gen B0 stepper Core processors, as shown in the table below. The 12th and 13th Gen Core only models with the K suffix support lossless step-down operation on B660/B760 motherboards by switching the microcode to no VUP.
Therefore, in terms of test platform, we found several Intel 14th Gen Core processors with different positioning for testing to see if the new feature is both versatile and practical. At the same time, the motherboard example with it is MSI's new B760M EDGE TI WIFI motherboard, which adopts a 12+1 channel 75A DrMos power supply solution, with sufficient heat dissipation and excellent performance in the price segment of more than 1,000 yuan. The rest of the specific accessories parameters are shown in the figure below.
It should be noted that the MSI B760M EDGE TI WIFI motherboard does not have a CEP setting option in version E7E11IMS.130 and earlier, and we used the beta version of E7E11IMS.141 when we tested it, and the follow-up MSI should be released in the official version soon (the official version of 7E11v14 has been updated at the time of writing).
Once in the BIOS, we can find the IA CEP Support For 14th option at the bottom of the Advanced CPU configuration in the OC menu, and if it is paired with a Z690/Z790 motherboard, the previous default CEP option will also be displayed at the same time. This function BIOS is automatically turned on by default, and when we manually turn off the CEP option dedicated to the 14th Gen Core, we can directly reduce the voltage without going to Microcode Selection in the OC menu to switch to no UVP.
After turning off IA CEP Support For 14th, the next step is to reduce the CPU voltage, we use the CPU Lite Load function option above it, which is used to adjust the voltage curve of the CPU, which provides multiple gears, the smaller the Mode number, the more aggressive the voltage curve scheme is, and the voltage will be lower when the CPU is loaded. If the CPU is adjusted to Mode 1, the CPU constitution allows us to step down the voltage further, and then go to the OC menu page to manually set the CPU voltage parameter value.
In the testing part, we used Cinbench R23 and AIDA64 software for stability stress testing, and used HWINFO and CPU-Z for data logging. Among them, AIDA64 performs a 15-minute FPU baking session and records the CPU temperature, power consumption, voltage, core frequency, and motherboard power MOS temperature, while CineBench R23 performs a 10-minute multi-threaded benchmark benchmark test and records the final score.
First of all, let's take a look at the baking situation of AIDA64, the room temperature is about 24 degrees during the test.
The Core i9-14900 in our hands is under the default BIOS settings, and the FPU oven directly hit the temperature wall of 100 degrees at the beginning, and there was a high temperature drop, and at 11 and a half minutes, the CPU power consumption was basically in the early 360W, and the temperature of the motherboard CPU power supply MOS was as high as 111 degrees. At this time, I don't plan to continue the full 15-minute test, after all, the temperature will only be higher, and too high a temperature will affect the life of the MOS.
After a period of debugging to participate in the stability test, our Core i9-14900 tends to be the best when turning off CEP and adjusting the CPU Lite Load to Mode 9, the CPU temperature is stable at about 89 degrees for 15 minutes, and the power consumption is reduced to more than 300W, but the pressure on MOS is still not small, the temperature is still 109 degrees, which is much better than the performance under the default settings, at least it will not reduce the frequency at high temperatures.
We then tested the Core i7-14700K, i7-14790F, and the relatively mass-market i5-14600K in the same way. Due to the different constitution of the CPU and the number of cores, the CPU Lite Load of these three CPUs can be adjusted to Mode 4, Mode 1 and Mode 1 respectively after turning off CEP, which has different degrees of improvement in temperature, power consumption and performance core frequency compared with the default settings.
Among these three processors, the Core i7-14700K has the most obvious energy efficiency improvement, compared with when CEP is turned on, the CPU power consumption is reduced by 41.8%, so that the CPU temperature is reduced to 77 degrees and no longer touches the CPU temperature wall The phenomenon of high temperature frequency reduction, the pressure on the motherboard CPU power supply MOS has also been greatly reduced, and the temperature has come from 109 degrees to 81 degrees.
As for the Core i7-14790F and i5-14600K, although they can be easily driven by default for MSI B760M EDGE TI WIFI motherboards, after turning off CEP and then stepping down, the CPU temperature and power consumption are also reduced a lot, and the main object of benefit should be more radiators, that is, users can pair these two processors with cooler products with lower specifications or more compact design for these two relatively less high-positioned processors to improve the flexibility of the whole machine.
As we mentioned earlier, when the motherboard does not turn off the CEP function, when the user wants to reduce the CPU voltage, it is easy to have the problem that the performance will drop as the voltage drops. Let's take the Core i9-14900 as an example here to replicate the extent to which reducing the voltage when CEP is on has on CPU performance. In order to better reflect the performance difference, here we add the CineBench R23 multi-core performance benchmark test.
Although the performance of the FPU oven without turning off the CEP step-down AIDA64 is very "excellent", in fact, the performance scheduling of the CPU is a problem. Combined with the CineBench R23 benchmark test, we can see that the impact of step-down on the CPU when CEP is enabled is huge on the multi-core performance of the CPU, and it has reached the level of directly cutting it in half.
After disabling CEP, not only can the performance of the CPU not be lost, but also due to the reduction of energy consumption, the core frequency of the CPU will be more stable under high load for a long time, so the running score will also be slightly improved.
Through comparison, we can find that this increase is basically linked to the specifications of the CPU itself and the physique, the higher the specs, the better the physique, and the more obvious the performance improvement brought by the voltage reduction. However, among them, the Core i7-14700K, which has improved the most, is only 2% stronger than the default, while the difference between the i5-14600K is only 0.5%. Therefore, the main function of disabling CEP is to improve the energy efficiency of the CPU, ensure the stable performance of the CPU without reducing the frequency, and reduce the performance requirements of related accessories.
Seeing this, I believe you basically have a certain understanding of this brand-new feature of MSI, but in the end, we still have to briefly summarize. MSI's feature added specifically for Intel's 14th Gen Core can bring a significant increase in energy efficiency to the B0 stepper model, effectively reducing the power consumption and temperature of the CPU, and the setup steps are not complicated, it may take a little more time to test the stability to ensure that the system runs daily.
Unfortunately, since we don't have a B0-stepping Core i5-14400(F) processor on our hands, we're not sure how much this feature will help it yet. However, according to the test results of this article, we can also make a simple guess: based on its default full-load power consumption is only about 80W, although it can also reduce the temperature and power consumption after turning off CEP, the amplitude should not be large, it is estimated to be around 50~60W, which is helpful for some Intel 600/700 series motherboards that are not too strong, especially those models without heat dissipation vests for CPU power MOS chips.
As we all know, Intel's 14th Gen Core is not significantly improved in terms of performance compared to the 13th Gen Core (with the possible exception of the Core i7-14700 series), and gamers generally think that "Thirteen Fragrances", I wonder if MSI can rekindle your desire to buy a 14th Gen Core processor after the launch of this practical feature specially designed for it?