Intel | Asus | Bios -> Is your CPU stuck in a low cycle state? It could be this.

The Problem

I ran into a very peculiar problem where my CPU on my gaming computer was stuck at 800 MHz. It was really odd because the motherboard was flagging a BD PROCHOT warning and locking the CPUs speed. However, upon checking the thermals on my CPU I was running in the nominal range. Nevertheless, no matter what I did to try and fix this, including changing settings in the bios I was stuck at 800 MHz.

The Specs

• Asus Maximus XII Motherboard
• Intel i9–10900k 3.7Ghz CPU
• Corsair H100i RGB Liquid Cooler
• UEFI Bios

The Solution

The solution for me was to go into the UEFI bios and to turn off the thermal monitoring. For some reason, on my motherboard, when having thermal monitoring enabled, it automatically sends a signal to windows and the motherboard that the CPU is too hot, even when it isn't.

After I disabled this setting, I rebooted the system and checked the bios one more time and was able to see my CPU at its nominal 3.7 GHz.

The difference

Before I turned off the thermal monitoring the CPU ratio was running at 8X, now it's running at 37X, so that is a huge difference in computational power.

To put that in perspective, it would take me 2–3 minutes to load a single level on Half-Life:Alyx, and now it takes me 8–10 sec.

Happy Hardware-ing!