I have an i7-14700K installed in an MSI PRO B760M-P DDR4 motherboard, along with a Samsung 980 1TB SSD, an RTX 5060 Ti, and Windows 11. The issue began after I replaced the motherboard with another identical model; the first board was damaged when I accidentally bent pins while installing a contact frame. The BIOS is up to date, but during Prime95 the CPU drops to around 3.0 GHz and does not turbo. The processor stays below roughly 70°C with a Royal Knight 120 cooler. What could be causing this throttling?
3 Answers
The likely issue is the motherboard's VRM power delivery. That model lacks proper VRM heatsinks, and a high-power i7-14700K can overwhelm it during sustained all-core workloads. The board may be reducing CPU clocks to protect the VRMs, even though the CPU temperature itself looks fine. Adding airflow directly over the VRM area might help temporarily, but a board with stronger power delivery and VRM heatsinks would be the better long-term solution.
The MSI PRO B760M-P DDR4 is a basic board and is not well suited to handling the sustained multicore load of a 14700K. If you keep using it, check the BIOS power-limit settings and reduce the CPU's long-term power limit. That should prevent the VRMs from forcing such an aggressive 3.0 GHz fallback, although performance will be lower. A stronger B760 board with substantial VRM heatsinks would be preferable.
The CPU is cooled by a Royal Knight 120 and generally stays under 70°C, so the cooler does not appear to be the limiting factor. Resize BAR is enabled, XMP is currently disabled, and during FurMark the CPU usage is only around 2–4%.
A motherboard can technically support the CPU while still being a poor match for its sustained power draw. The processor is probably being limited by motherboard power or VRM temperatures rather than its own core temperature.