Sudden Permanent Decrease in 13900k Performance

[wGale]

Been in an endless loop of (trying for hours at 4 AM once every few weeks to solve this -> giving up) for months now. I'm not super experienced in overclocking but I've had a great stock 13900k since December of 2022 which I also had comfortably overclocked because why not. I don't remember my old OC but the bottom line is: suddenly after a few months of running this rig (I want to say around May '23), I can't even squeeze the tiniest amount of performance out of this chip anymore without it BSOD'ing or just crashing Cinebench immediately. Even if I leave it stock, it's now significantly worse than it used to be for no apparent reason. I don't recall when exactly it happened or if I installed something right before this happened but I don't believe that to be the cause regardless. I use Cinebench R23 as my main benchmark and now sit at around 33k multicore stock to 35k with max possible OC without crashing of any sort. Used to sit at ~39k stock when I first got it. I use Intel XTU and I've noticed, running stock, I'm constantly experiencing "Current/EDP Limit Throttling". My clocks also drop dramatically under load, even more so if I attempt to OC I believe. I know my cooler is capable and that I'm not thermal throttling. Voltage regulator in the BIOS cannot be the issue because, as previously mentioned, I've used this motherboard with default BIOS settings before and had significantly better performance. I never updated the BIOS at any point since then. If anyone can help me figure out what's causing this and how to fix it, it would be beyond appreciated. Thank you

Specs:

• Intel Core i9 13900K

• ARCTIC Liquid Freezer II 360

• Noctua NT-H1 Thermal Paste

• ASRock Z790 PG Lightning

• Corsair Vengeance 64GB DDR5 5200MHz CL40

• ZOTAC RTX 4080

• Samsung 970 EVO Plus 2TB SSD

• EVGA SuperNOVA 1000 GT PSU

• Windows 10 Home 22H2

What I've Tried:

• Updating drivers, Windows

• Increasing Core IccMax (just causes system instability and doesn't improve clocks/performance whatsoever)

• Remounting CPU cooler + new thermal paste

• Scanning and repairing my main drive with the chkdsk command (after I found something suspicious in Windows Event Viewer)

• Checked and fastened cable connections to the MB

• Fiddling with several BIOS settings (don't exactly remember which but I would reset everything back to default when nothing worked, though I never changed anything in the BIOS to cause this in the first place. reapplied XMP and whatnot each time of course)

• Many curse words

[ACarmona_Intel]

Hello WGale, 

Thank you for posting in our Intel communities.

We have sent a reply to you regarding our concern via email. Please check your inbox.

Thank you, and have a great day ahead!

Best regards,

Carmona A.

Intel Customer Support Technician