It may be a bit too early to say that patch 0x114 won’t enhance the gaming performance since the CPUs haven’t been tested out in games. However, some users say they aren’t seeing any noticeable changes.
ASRock Z890 Taichi OCF receives the Microcode 0x114, enhances memory overclocking but drops CPU clock speed
Intel’s promised microcode may be coming in a few days but surprisingly, the microcode 0x114 has already been dropped by a user on Overclock forums. This isn’t official from the motherboard vendors yet but this patch is definitely going to hit the support pages soon.
The overclocker Nickshih posted the microcode 0x114 patch on Overclock forums, made for the ASRock Z890 Taichi OCF. However, it was also applied by a user with an ASUS ROG Maximus Z890 Apex motherboard. Another Taichi OCF owner applied this microcode to his motherboard and surprisingly, none of them reported any noticeable changes except for a few.
The Apex motherboard owner reported no performance change. On the other hand, the other user did see some performance impacts but it was rather regressive. In the Cinebench R23 multi-core benchmark, the Core Ultra 9 285k yielded just over 45,000 points while usually it results in around 48,000 points. The culprit is said to be the dropping of clock speeds even though these were set manually.
Meanwhile, the memory performance seems to have improved with the patch. The user was able to achieve over 10,000 MT/s of speed on dual DDR5 sticks, which was a world record by Nickshih recently. As for gaming, we are yet to see the latest benchmarks. It is possible that the microcode 0x114 won’t work as efficiently as with the full BIOS release or it is also possible that the microcode won’t affect the gaming performance in entirety.
The synthetic benchmarks may be too early to indicate that there is no performance boost but we will see how this goes once the motherboard vendors are shipped the latest BIOS with microcode 0x114 patch by Intel. We recently saw that with in-game enhancements, the Core Ultra 9 285K can achieve up to 30% better performance in Cyberpunk 2077 but this much performance boost may not happen with just a microcode.
