> Intel Suspiciously Throwing 350 Watt Extreme Performance Mode At Raptor Lake

I never thought of Intel as a company that would panic. Or even be reactionary. Intel is usually the company everyone wants to be. They’re the powerhouse of chips. But this latest rumor of an “extreme performance” mode seems less like something Intel would do and more like something AMD would do to grab attention. Up until the last few years anyway.

Intel’s Raptor Lake flagship, the Core i9-13900K, is going to feature a new “Extreme Performance” mode on high-end Z790 motherboards. The new performance mode would essentially allow the chip to run at an unchained power setting, sipping over 300 Watts of power to deliver its fullest potential.

First off it’s only on high end boards. Most people building PCs aren’t spending that much on a high end configuration. I’d even argue most people can’t. A cursory glance at Newegg shows high end Intel 12th gen boards at around the $650 mark for the Asus Maximus Z690 Hero. That’s more than most people spend on a CPU. Then there was the ASRock Z690 Taichi coming in at much more reasonable $440. I can’t imagine a “high end” board that will have this feature being much cheaper than these.

Consider a boxed Core i9-12900K is going for $590 and a Core i7-12700K for $400. I didn’t bother to check the much more mainstream Core i5. So $840 pre tax if you go with the cheaper ASRock board and an i7. Going one step higher to the i9 will run you $1090 with the same board. I imagine that’s more than half most people’s build budgets and we haven’t even touched on DDR5.

It does make me stop and go “what the fuck” just not in a good way. Sure being the first to 6Ghz isn’t a bad thing. The way they’re doing it is.

As ProHardver explains, the Intel Core i9-13900K CPUs or the Raptor Lake Core i9 “K” series in general, are going to get a new profile known as “Extreme Performance”. This is also known as “Unlimited Power” setting on certain motherboards. What this profile essentially does is unlock Raptor Lake’s power limit and let it reach up to a power-gobbling 350 Watts at stock loads. The higher power results in higher performance but at the cost of the aforementioned power budget and thermals.

This “Extreme Performance” mode will be amongst the several overclocking and tuning options coming to the Raptor Lake “K-series” CPU lineup. An interesting thing that the site states is that high-end Z790 motherboards will be required and only a certain will be qualified to support the feature. It is evident that a 350W power design will require a lot of cooling, not just for the CPU but also for the motherboard VRMs. Also, whether this feature remains exclusive to Z790 boards or also comes to Z690 is something only time will tell. The high-end Z690 boards are capable enough so some vendors may release the BIOS with “Extreme Performance” mode for current-gen boards too.

We have already seen overclocks of over 6 GHz pushing the power consumption to 350W and this profile is going to do the same thing. Overclockers will definitely be setting their boards to run at the “Extreme Performance” mode for best overclocking results while users can stick with the standard power profile and still get decent performance out of the chip. It is mostly a matter of preference here since a 350W power draws on the CPU alone isn’t sustainable for the gamer’s room considering the heat that this beast would output. Even using a high-end cooling solution, one shouldn’t expect temps lower than 70-80C while running at full load.

The “K” series are the flagship series that are unlocked and can be overclocked and it comes with integrated graphics. It makes sense it would appear on this series first.

The problem that I have with this mode is that it literally screams of Intel just wanting to claim “First”. As if this were Slashdot circa 1997. But really this just reeks of insecurity. What does Intel know about the very soon to be launched Zen 4 and new Ryzen series chips that has them so worried that they need to resort to this? Because this really is just another checkbox on a feature list. This “feature” is pure marketing and isn’t really going to be used by many people. I certainly can’t see this factoring heavily into anyone’s buying decision. I just can’t see anyone saying “You know what? I’m going to get that new Intel chip and run it at 6 Ghz. Who cares if I burn my house down.”

I haven’t seen anything in the rumor mill that suggests that this wouldn’t be a close competition between Intel and AMD. Is it because at some point AMD is going to release a second round of Zen 4 series chips with v-cache and it will eat Raptor Lake’s lunch? Or perhaps even launch Zen 4 with v-cache? If these are new chips they should be fairly equally matched right? This shouldn’t be like the 11th gen Intel Core series chips all over again right? And V-cache did make AMD scale back some of their core clock speeds even if games got better performance. That pull back on pure clock cost them in other areas though so, at least for Zen 3, it was s compromise. It wasn’t a pure upgrade. But Zen 3 is now trading blows with Alder Lake.

Something doesn’t seem right here and it looks like Intel saw something that freaked it out. This doesn’t pass the smell test. I’m wondering if Raptor Lake isn’t going to match up well and Intel knows it.

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