Why is my i5-14600KF stuttering in heavy combat?
When facing a swarm of enemies, my frame times would suddenly jump from 12ms to 40ms, which completely ruins the rhythm of a hardcore action game. The E-cores on the i5-14600KF were hitting a scheduling wall during physics calculations, leaving some cores pegged at 100% while the P-cores just sat there. I first tried the 'High Performance' power plan in Windows, but it only gained me about 3 FPS—basically nothing—proving the bottleneck was deeper in the scheduler. I went into the BIOS advanced voltage settings, switched Load-Line Calibration to manual, and nudged the VCCSA voltage from 1.20V to 1.25V. In RTSS, the frame time swings of 15-40ms finally tightened up to a smooth 11-16ms. I did have one instant reboot after the first voltage bump, but offsetting it to +0.01V instead of +0.02V made it rock solid. CPU temps are 68-78℃. Cinebench R23 multi-core tests confirmed the scheduling is finally optimized, and RAM stays at 58-63℃.
