Clearly, it takes a brave man to apply a bios update whose source is not verified… Yet that’s what some people on the Overclock.net forum did when Intel released its leaked 0x114 patch. It’s worth noting that this patch was announced by team blue in response to the disappointing performance of Core Ultra 200s in games. Unfortunately, initial feedback suggests that the patch is not much better.
0x114: not up to scratch?
First of all, it’s important to note that motherboard manufacturers are not yet officially offering this patch. Indeed, the manufacturers’ pages only highlight the current 0x113, with nothing about the latter. So, we don’t know which version of 0x114 we’re talking about: is it a first draft? A version close to launch? A mystery.
In any case, it’s clear that it’s not crazy, and some have even lost performance…One user ‘s Cinebench score even dropped (U9 285K Z890 Taichi OCF) due to lower frequencies. As for Cyberpunk 2077, which has recently been updated, another user reports performance gains of 3% with a 10% reduction in power consumption. In short, nothing crazy.
It’s also worth noting that if the performance in question isn’t up to expectations, it’s because of the way the processor is organized. With Arrow Lake, Intel has embarked on a tiled processor with a memory controller mounted on the SoC tile. The result is long L3 cache access times, which is not a good thing for video games.
We learn from Tom’s Hardware, that Intel will not be repeating the same mistake for future generations. With the Core U300 and Panther Lake, according to the latest rumors, the memory controller should be reintegrated into the CPU tile.
