by theygamesConventional wisdom says that the faster your CPU clock speed the better, at least when it comes to gaming, but the developers of Outpost: Infinity Siege have advised owners of top-end Intel CPUs that they need to make their processors run slower if they want the game to avoid “crashes and screen blackouts.” Forget overclocking your Intel CPU to get better gaming performance, underclocking is the name of the game here.
The Intel CPUs affected include the new Core i9 14900K, which is currently listed on our best gaming CPU guide as Intel’s most powerful chip for gaming right now. Not only does it have 24 cores at its disposal, with eight P-Cores and 16 E-Cores, but it also has a very high maximum turbo clock of 6GHz, as long as your CPU cooler has enough power to keep it in check.
However, it’s this CPU and its predecessor, the Core i9 13900K, that Outpost: Infinity Siege developer Team Ranger advises gamers to underclock in order to make the game run stably. Specifically, the advice is to underclock these CPUs if you’re using them in conjunction with a GeForce RTX 4090 GPU, presumably as this combination is particularly power-hungry and hot running.
“We are urgently addressing high-priority issues such as crashes and screen blackouts,” says the developer in the patch notes for the game, and has a specific piece of advice for gamers with this hardware combo. “For users with 4090 graphics cards and 13900K or 14900K CPUs,” the note recommends to “utilize XTU (Extreme Tuning Utility) to lower the CPU frequency (e.g. from 5.5 to 5).”
XTU is Intel’s own software for easily adjusting the clock speed of your CPU in Windows, though there are other methods of doing it as well. You can follow the same principles in our guide on how to overclock your CPU if you want to run your processor at a lower clock speed too. Both these CPUs have much higher top boost clocks than 5.5GHz, though, with the 14900K boosting to 6GHz, and the 13900K hitting 5.8GHz. Running the 14900K at 5GHz will basically knock a massive 1GHz off its clock speed.
These processors do run very hot, and they consume a lot of power as well. As we stated in our Core i9 14900K review, “it’s impossible to ignore how hot this chip runs,” as well as “its thirst for watts.” On X (formerly Twitter), tech leaker @Sebasti66855537 put the problem down to “some chips” having “bad/below average silicon quality, and that gets further compounded when mobo manufacturers push these chips beyond the spec that Intel tested them at.”
If you’re looking to build a gaming PC with a fast gaming CPU that doesn’t eat power supplies for breakfast, check out our AMD Ryzen 7800X3D review, as this eight-core chip is supremely powerful in games and also much cheaper than the Core i9 14900K.