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[GUIDE] How to make your i9 12900K incredibly efficient

Overclocking

Hello, I'd like to share with you on how you can improve the efficiency of your i9 12900K tremendously.
It's going to work on any CPU really.

Step 1 - Undervolting

  1. Enter BIOS

  2. Go into CPU settings or advanced CPU settings

  3. Edit Dynamic VCore voltage, set it to -50mV (-0.050V)

  4. Keep benchmarking it and progressively go down by -10mV each time, or immediately go up to -100mV and work your way down if it's unstable (or up, if it's good!)

Step 2 - Power Limit

  1. In BIOS, find Turbo Power Limit option

  2. Set your power limit to 175W (the max wattage of this CPU is 241W natively)

Step 3 - Adjusting fan curves (optional)

  1. In BIOS, enter the fan settings and move your fan curves down.
    It's likely that the fans can spin noticeably slower, while becoming only slightly less efficient at cooling your CPU.

Step 4 - Benchmark, benchmark, benchmark!
This is the most important step! You need to test your CPU in a benchmark, for example Cinebench 2024, to make sure that it's stable and that it performs well!

What can you expect?

On my unit, I went from, at default settings: 95C, 1650RPM, 435W (combined power draw including monitors) and 1537 score.

To undervolted, power limitted and adjusted fan curves: 75C, 1440RPM, 360W (combined power draw including monitors) and 1531 score.

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Similar results with my 13900K. I'm down a massive /s 6% Cinebench performance over completely turning off the power limits. I run at -120mv for the voltage offset and -50mv on the SoC voltage. I capped mine at the stock 253W power limits and left it at that since it was already cool enough for me at that point. I haven't bothered testing down lower as I'm happy to be done tinkering and just use my PC instead. I think a large portion of my apparent performance scaling is that my E-cores magically gained 100mhz somewhere along the way.

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You've told us about the performance drop compared to no power limit, could you elaborate by also sharing info about your thermals before and after? That's the most exciting part, for me at least.

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Hello! It looks like this might be about cooling that violates our rules on r/Intel. Modern CPUs are designed to run hot. Just like 95C is normal for AMD Ryzen CPUs, 100C is normal for Intel CPUs in many workloads. If your post is about a cooling problem, please delete this post and resubmit it to r/buildapc or r/techsupport. If not please click report on this comment and the moderators will take a look. Thanks!

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This also works on other CPUs although you might want to set different power limits for each

I do -60 MV on my r9 5900X

Edit one thing you could try is soc voltage

Soc is always at the same voltage idle and load so it's a significant draw on idle power I was able to drop mine from 1.18v to 0.95V saving around 3 watts at idle and without changing power limits this gave me a small boost in cinebench